On a summer day in 1974, Elizabeth Fink walked into a small legal office in Buffalo, having borrowed her mother’s car and driven 400 miles from Brooklyn to present herself for a new job. She was 29 and a year out of law school. The job at Attica Brothers Legal Defense — a shoestring operation set up to help inmates and former inmates of Attica state prison after the infamous prisoner rebellion there — offered room and board but no pay. As a career choice, it was interesting but obviously unsustainable. She planned to give it two weeks.

Sustenance, however, comes in many forms. On Fink’s first day of work, she met the executive director, a man called Big Black. His real name was Frank Smith, but nobody used it. He was 6-foot-2, weighed about 300 pounds and was just out of prison, having served 15 years for robbing an illegal craps game in Brooklyn. He had a commanding presence and a smile that was genial, despite all that Attica had done to him.

The Attica uprising began in early September 1971, when frustration with poor prison conditions boiled over into rebellion. Roughly a thousand prisoners rioted and locked several dozen staff members and civilian contractors in cells as hos­tages. Organizing themselves politically, they drew up a list of demands — better medical care, less solitary confinement and more fresh fruit, among other things. But negotiations stalled fast, and the reprisal, when it came by order of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, was a horror. Four days into the revolt, helicopters blasted tear gas over the yard while state troopers and National Guard soldiers in gas masks opened fire on the unarmed prisoners, unloading 4,500 rounds of ammunition in less than six minutes. In the end, 33 inmates and 10 hostages were dead. ‘‘The shooting just seemed to go on and on,’’ a hostage would recall. ‘‘You could hear people crying, people dying.’’

Afterward, Big Black was beaten and tortured for six hours. He was forced to lie naked on a table while vengeful law-enforcement officers insulted him with racial slurs, hit his genitals and burned him with cigarettes. They put a football beneath his chin and told him that if he let it drop, he would be killed. He recalled that day in the 2001 documentary ‘‘Ghosts of Attica,’’ saying that for years he wept whenever he tried to talk about it — that what he felt most was ‘‘disappointment in the world, disappointment in people.’’

Scores of other inmates experienced similar torment. Men were stripped, beaten, sodomized, forced to crawl over glass. Hearing their stories, Elizabeth Fink began to understand something about disappointment in the world. It couldn’t be reversed, but possibly it could be countered. Ditching her two-week plan, she ultimately became lead counsel for a $2.8 billion civil suit filed in 1974 against the State of New York on behalf of more than 1,200 victims of Attica. She then worked on the case for the next 26 years.

Leaving Buffalo, Fink opened a law office in Brooklyn, hiring Big Black as her paralegal. He hadn’t finished high school, but he knew how to read people, how to connect. And he was stubbornly persistent, the same way she was, a quality that came in handy as the civil suit dragged on. Any time someone referred to Big Black as her employee, Fink would issue a correction. ‘‘We’re partners,’’ she would say.

Raised on Long Island, Fink was introduced early to the injustices of the day. Her parents belonged for a time to the American Communist Party. Her mother, Sylvia, was an activist, crusading against racial inequity. In the 1950s, the family drove annually to Miami for a vacation, stopping at diners for meals. Sylvia Fink would order food and then pleasantly ask whether the restaurant served black people. When the answer was ‘‘no,’’ she would order her children to their feet, and they would all march out. ‘‘We didn’t eat a lot on those drives,’’ her daughter recalled.

In her legal dealings, Elizabeth Fink could be fractious and loud-voiced. She had a near-photographic memory and gave eloquent, off-the-cuff speeches. She showed her disregard for arrogant prosecutors by spreading her belongings wantonly across their tables in the courtroom and by ‘‘accidentally’’ bumping up against them. She was irreverent and outrageous and, much of the time, madly effective. She took on cases other lawyers wouldn’t touch, spurred by the belief that the United States government often overreached, violating the rights of those who dared criticize it. She represented Black Panthers, members of the Puerto Rican independence movement. She represented a radical lawyer named Lynne Stewart, who was jailed for passing messages to the followers of an Islamic cleric, and Jeremy Hammond, an activist who hacked the email records of a private intelligence company and fed them to WikiLeaks. When an agitated opposing lawyer accused her of ‘‘jeopardizing the Republic,’’ Fink took it as a compliment. ‘‘I think I’d like that on my tombstone,’’ she said.

Photo illustration by Craig Cutler for The New York Times

At her apartment in Brooklyn, where she lived alone with her dog, she read mystery novels, smoked pot and played jazz extra loud. Her guest bedroom often housed one ex-convict or another, old clients who came to visit. Lawyering, she believed, went beyond paperwork and court appearances and had little to do with getting paid. She bought books for inmates and drove their families to prison visits. She once cooked a lobster dinner and smuggled it into a New York City prison beneath her clothes, past security guards, to serve a clandestine birthday meal to an old Black Panther, who by then had spent more than a decade in jail.

The injustice of Attica galled her all along. Many of her plaintiffs in the suit died as they waited for resolution. Others were racked by nightmares and flashbacks; by addiction, anxiety and injuries that still ached after decades; by homelessness and joblessness and a lifelong inability to trust others. It’s all there in the court documents, a sad catalog of the aftermath. When the case was finally settled in 2000, Fink and Big Black tracked down hundreds of the Attica brothers, chartering a bus from Manhattan to take many of them to the court. After hearing testimony from about 200 former inmates, a federal judge meted out an $8 million settlement in amounts ranging from $6,500 to $125,000 per inmate, concluding that they had been treated ‘‘like garbage.’’

Fink understood the victory to be hollow. She had sustained the Attica brothers through one of the lengthiest civil cases in New York State history, but there was no reparation that would dislodge the disappointment from all those men’s souls. ‘‘I don’t see anything that’s going to make me forget about what happened in 1971,’’ Big Black said at the time. ‘‘You can give me a billion, trillion, zillion dollars, but it’s not gonna happen.’’ He died of cancer four years later.

Fink continued on, visiting countless inmates inside American prisons, her heart wrenched every time. Many clients were locked in solitary confinement — so lonely that she scheduled four-day visits with them, knowing they would need to spend two days connecting on a human level before they could get to the legal work at hand. ‘‘I am totally burned out,’’ she told Michael Hull, a filmmaker and family friend, earlier this year. But then she brightened, recalling a visit she made to a San Francisco penitentiary to see two clients. A prison lieutenant, she said, had watched her embracing the inmates and later pulled her aside. Fink let out a bellowing laugh, an old defiance flaring as she described the lieutenant’s shock: ‘‘He said, ‘You hug them?’ … I said, ‘Yeah, and I kiss ’em too. … I do every time.’ ’’

Frances Kroll Ring B. 1916

More Than a Secretary

She befriended F. Scott Fitzgerald and never let go.

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Frances Kroll Ring in 1978.
Credit
Photograph by Amanda Blanco

By J. R. Moehringer

One day Frances Kroll Ring read to him from his beloved Keats. He was lying in bed, ill, frail, probably hung over, and the words hit him with special force. He had tears in his eyes, so she stopped, left the room and let him rest.

F. Scott Fitzgerald surely knew that Keats, on his deathbed, was read to by his young friend Joseph Severn. Did he have a sense that he was re-enacting that famous scene? That his young friend, Ring, might be his Severn? Did she?

Their relationship began in April 1939 with another bedside scene. By chance, Rusty’s Employment Agency in Hollywood sent her to Fitzgerald’s house in Encino to interview for a job as his secretary. Nervously, she walked into the house and into the bedroom and discovered the author of America’s Great Novel propped limply against the pillows.

‘‘He was a very handsome man,’’ she told me in 1996, when I interviewed her for The Los Angeles Times. ‘‘He looked very pale, and he had sort of faded blond hair and blue-green eyes. He sat me down, and it was a lovely room. It was a country farmhouse, and the sun was coming in, and he had me open a drawer — and it was filled with empty gin bottles.’’

She was 22, wholly innocent. He was 42, anything but. Deeply in debt, artistically discouraged, physically compromised by years of drink and by tuberculosis, the disease that killed Keats.

And yet they were well matched. Maybe it was because each was trying to make a fresh start on a new coast. Ring had recently come to California from the Bronx, where she grew up; Fitzgerald had come from North Carolina, where his estranged wife, Zelda, was confined to a sanitarium. In fact, he told Ring he had just returned from an unhappy tryst with Zelda in Cuba, the last time they would ever see each other. One of Ring’s first tasks was to type a letter of conciliation and apology.

Her main task, however, was the new novel. For $35 a week, she typed up the oversize sheets he covered with his knife-blunted pencils. If he had no new pages for her, she might restock his supply of cigarettes and sodas, warm up his favorite turtle soup, pick up his groceries, run interference with his daughter, Scottie, a Vassar student, and his girlfriend, Sheilah Graham, a Hollywood gossip columnist.

Sometimes, she simply listened. Fitzgerald talked to Ring about everything: politics, religion, family, Hemingway, his publisher — his career. He shared with her his sorrow at no longer being read, his determination to be good again. In her 1985 memoir, ‘‘Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald,’’ Ring described how stirring it was to see him shake off his demons and give himself to the work — like ‘‘an athlete who had let himself go to fat decide that he was going to make a comeback.’’

Over 20 intense months, their relationship evolved. Fitzgerald cast Ring in many roles, and vice versa. Father and daughter, tutor and pupil, boon companions. At times it got confusing. He made a pass at her, which she deftly blocked. Throughout, she remained the wide-eyed observer, the empathetic witness to his doomed desire.

In the following days and weeks, it all fell to her. Pay his bills. Pack his things. Gather his unfinished novel and meet with his editor, Maxwell Perkins.

But she never really stopped. She spent the next seven decades wrapping up — consoling Zelda, befriending Scottie, meeting with journalists and scholars and fans. As Severn did with Keats, she told the world again and again how it was at the end.

She also played a vital role in the campaign to restore Fitzgerald’s reputation. Many dismissed him as a frivolous, wanton betrayer of his own talent. Ring, attending academic conferences, working closely with biographers, bolstered the counternarrative, testifying to the man’s seriousness. And when Edmund Wilson edited a posthumous version of ‘‘The Last Tycoon,’’ Ring wrote the esteemed critic that he’d missed the point. The book wasn’t about Hollywood; it was about the tycoon, a man who believed in ‘‘infinite loyalty.’’

Though she accomplished much in her own right — editor, writer, wife, mother — Ring never escaped the shadow of Fitzgerald, a fact she neither resisted nor resented. There was love and pride in her voice when she told me that it was she and she alone who chose the gray coffin and dark Brooks Brothers suit in which Fitzgerald was buried.

In the most moving passage of her memoir, she describes their final moments — strangely reminiscent of their first. Fitzgerald lies in the tiny back room of a Los Angeles funeral parlor, and Ring stares down. She notes the mortician’s touchups (pinked cheeks, waxen features) and laments the terrible waste. At last, before leaving her boss, she allows herself one long look, and one final word: Goodbye.

Lisa Bonchek Adams B. 1969

Follow Me

She taught us how to die.

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Lisa Bonchek Adams in 2010.
Credit
Photograph by Jill Kisel

By Elizabeth Weil

Death presents a problem every time. Everybody’s a rookie, everybody’s afraid.

Lisa Bonchek Adams typed her way unto the breach. A realist, an atheist and not at all sappy, she detested the notion that cancer was a gift. (Really, she asked, would you give it to somebody?) But one tweet and one blog post at a time, her illness became her subject matter. Part diarist, part Dear Abby, she chronicled her experience with cancer — dispensing insight and advice, avoiding euphemism and sentimentality. The value of a friend who texts: ‘‘Running to Costco. Need anything?’’ The strangeness of waiting in a gas-station line with chemo pills in your purse. The importance of sending your children and spouse on vacation so they realize they can survive without you.

Adams first received a diagnosis of breast cancer in 2006. She had a double mastectomy, and a year later, a salpingo-oopho­rectomy. (This means she had her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed. Adams insisted on using and defining scientific terms.) She continued to write about her daily life. The way her breast implants felt icy in the winter. What to say when a co-worker has a chronic illness. (‘‘Has this been a good week or a bad week for you?’’ instead of “How are you?’’) The times she wanted to yell at her well-meaning family, ‘‘If you’d had cancer, you would understand!’’ Many readers found her an inspiration — to which she replied, skeptically, ‘‘I guess I’m an inspiration because I’m still alive.’’ Then, in October 2012, her writing became more urgent.

‘‘Some of you have heard the news by now,’’ she wrote on her blog. ‘‘This week I received confirmation that my cancer has returned, now it has metastasized to my bones. It is not bone cancer. It is breast cancer that is in my bones. This means it’s Stage IV breast cancer.’’

This was classic Adams: clear, instructive, unclouded by emotion. It was also her means of saying, Follow me, as she led readers into a calm, if painful, dress rehearsal for navigating relationships near life’s end. Soon after she shared her diagnosis, Bonchek wrote an essay called ‘‘The Hardest Conversation,’’ about telling her teenage daughter that her cancer had returned and was now incurable. The moment is heartbreaking — but this was not Adams’s point. ‘‘I told her that I understood that sickness could be scary,’’ Adams writes, ‘‘that I didn’t want her to be afraid of me as I got sicker someday.’’ Nothing fancy. Nothing even unexpected. Yet when I and so many others read this, we came away thinking, If I ever have to face this moment myself, I’ll feel slightly more prepared.

Photo illustration by Craig Cutler for The New York Times

Over the weeks and months that followed, the ultimate humanity semi­nar continued. The painful reality that part of your job is to teach your children not to need you. Why saying ‘‘You look great!’’ (even if you mean it) doesn’t always make a sick person feel good. How your relationship with your parents will change. Adams shared the details of her treatment — the switches from one protocol to the next as her cancer became resistant, the port implanted for intravenous drug delivery, the fluid drained from her abdomen and lungs. The accumulation of specifics was part of the lesson: a way to show what illness is really like.

Adams’s father was a heart sur­geon, and her mother was a psychologist who specializes in grief, so perhaps she was uniquely suited to dispensing clinical and emo­tional intelligence from sick­ness’s front. Still, Mark Bonchek, Adams’s brother, who wrote his dissertation on social media, was amazed to see how deeply people con­nected with his sister over Twitter. ‘‘There was something that the situation’’ — who Adams was, her diagnosis, social media’s weird admixture of intimacy and distance — ‘‘brought out in her,’’ he said. Even fellow patients, like Kelly Bergin, who is 29, described how Adams ‘‘had this incredible knowledge of how to be sick.’’ She told me, ‘‘She understood why I didn’t want to attach my body with another piece of equipment. She could nag me to do things that, if my mom said it, I’d be like: ‘God, Mom, stop. You don’t understand.’ ’’

The end was raw and tough to read.

There are many tiny malignant lesions in the brain (imagine salt sprinkled onto a bowl of popcorn).

If you have/had treatment for cancer, learn how to succinctly and accurately tell your medical history with names of chemo.

I haven’t seen the moon in months.

At Adams’s memorial service, her husband shared an anecdote that showed her unique blend of thoughtfulness and practicality, even in extremis. That week, two mysterious boxes had arrived at the Adams home. She ordered birthday presents for her youngest child two days before she died.

Hermann Zapf B. 1918

Playing Against Type

His stylish symbols were a precursor of emoji.

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Hermann Zapf in the early 1960s.
Credit
From Jerry Kelly.

By Willy Staley

When a mourner visits the September 11 Memorial and makes a pencil rubbing of a loved one’s name, he reveals, stroke by stroke, the handi­work of Hermann Zapf. The same is true at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial; each inscribes the names of the dead in a font called Optima, one of Zapf’s most lasting contributions to the field of typography. Classical and solemn, Optima was inspired by the lettering on a tombstone in Florence. Neither serifed nor truly sans — the letters bulge at their ends, but don’t sprout feet — Optima was like Zapf himself: forward looking, yet slyly traditional.

Born in Nuremberg in 1918, Zapf came of fighting age as Hitler was dragging Germany back into war. After dodging Wehrmacht service because of a heart condition, he was summoned to an artillery unit at Weimar. In a brief autobiography, Zapf said he made such an inept soldier — confusing right and left, ‘‘very clumsy’’ with weaponry — that his superiors banished him to office work. He joined the cartography unit and drew maps of Spain’s railroads. When a call came to pull able-bodied mapmakers back into battle, Zapf wrote, in immaculate letters just millimeters tall, the name and rank of the officer in charge of selecting soldiers. ‘‘He took a close look at it, and his monocle fell off,’’ Zapf wrote. He kept his job.

Zapf’s passion for calligraphy is apparent in his work, with the notable exception of his oddest creation: Zapf Dingbats, a set of glyphs that looks like the language of an alien race brought low by office drudgery — all scissors, pencils, fingers, arrows, envelopes and telephones. What might possess a master to invent those?

Zapf was a practical man — a capital-M Modernist who wore a white shirt and a black tie — and he made Dingbats for a practical reason. In the ’70s there was no formalized set of embellishments in typesetting. The system was ad hoc until Dingbats came along. Steve Jobs included them with Apple’s laser printers in the ’80s. Soon, people started playing with them. In 1994, the art director of Ray Gun, a rock magazine, hated an article he was about to publish so much that he set the whole thing in Dingbats.

We have since grown accustomed to using symbols to enrich text rather than obscure it. Zapf, who started his career when type was still set in hot metal, would live to see emoji in The New Yorker, and he remained engaged with new technologies all the while (though an old colleague recalls that he loathed email). Delivering a lecture at Harvard at the dawn of the computer age, he urged his audience to embrace the future. ‘‘Does the new technology mean the serious lettering artist will be dispensable?’’ he said. ‘‘No. The alphabet remains.’’

After learning that he had terminal cancer early this year, Oliver Sacks (b. 1933), a neurologist and the author of books like ‘‘Awakenings’’ and ‘‘An Anthropologist on Mars,’’ published an essay about it in The Times. ‘‘When people die, they cannot be replaced,’’ he wrote. ‘‘They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.’’

James Salter B. 1925

Writing Like Flying

The fighter-pilot past of James Salter.

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James Salter in 1999.
Credit
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

By Will Mackin

I joined the Navy hoping to fly fighters. F-14s, specifically, because that’s what Maverick flew in ‘‘Top Gun.’’ Instead I wound up flying the EA-6B Prowler — a heavy, underpowered minivan of a jet. The Prowler carried no guns, no air-to-air missiles. Its canopy was more iron than glass. Its bulbous nose was known to sometimes implode at tactical airspeeds. In short, it had no business dogfighting. Still, we mock-fought each other, Prowler versus Prowler, by cutting slow, protracted arcs at the wobbly edge of aerodynamic stall. Thus did we lock ourselves in epic, sluggish battle, until one jet claimed dubious advantage over the other or we got too close to the ground.

I supplemented my questionable dogfighting experience by reading accounts written by actual fighter pilots. I knew enough about flying to recognize that a majority of their stories rang false. Bravado masked fear. Flowery language obviated the central role of the nuts-and-bolts machine. Then I read James Salter.

Between February and August 1952, Salter flew more than a hundred missions in the F-86, hunting MiG-15s in the skies over Korea. His first novel, ‘‘The Hunters,’’ and significant parts of his memoir, ‘‘Burning the Days,’’ are based on that experience. Reading these books and his other writing, I was captivated by Salter’s rendition of aerial combat. By how you could almost say, ‘‘Oh, God’’ between red-hot volleys of the MiG-15’s cannon. How following an adversary earthward for a guns-kill felt like ‘‘leaping from a wall.’’ Faithful as the battle scenes were, though, Salter’s renditions of everyday squadron life were even more so.

From the smell of jet exhaust in the morning air, ‘‘oily and dark,’’ to the feeling of isolation as the ‘‘canopy ground shut and sealed you off,’’ to the strangeness of being suspended ‘‘up near the sun where the air is burning cold, amid all that is familiar, the scratches on the canopy, the chipped black of the instrument panel, the worn red cloth of the safety streamers stuffed in a pocket down near your shoe,’’ Salter’s writing about flying made me miss flying even while I was still flying.

This mastery of the everyday extends to his novels, especially ‘‘A Sport and a Pastime’’ and ‘‘Light Years.’’ For each, it seemed as if Salter had dedicated an entire lifetime to putting the exact right words in the exact right order, and with devastating effect. This might lead a reader to assume that Salter had never been something as unliterary as a fighter pilot. Salter himself, at times, seemed eager to disown this part of his biography. When asked if he’d learned anything from flying that helped him in his writing, he answered, ‘‘The time flying, that didn’t count. … You deduct that from your literary career.’’ Looking back on his years as a pilot, he said, ‘‘… that isn’t my life. I have said many times I don’t want to be considered one who once flew fighters. That’s not who I am.’’

Photo illustration by Craig Cutler for The New York Times

Yet passage after passage of Salter’s prose reads otherwise. This excerpt from ‘‘Light Years,’’ for example, in which the main character, Viri, takes brutal stock of his life in Rome: ‘‘ … alone in this city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life — it was not worth much — not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage, he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one — we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist.’’

In this passage, as in many others, you can sense Salter’s search for the idea, or the feeling, or the mood behind the fictional moment. I see him sitting at his desk, as he once sat in the cockpit over Korea, staring out in front of him, a space that can be defined only by what’s not there. He doesn’t know exactly what he wants to say, or how to say it, but he feels its presence. As his search goes on, he may begin to doubt the existence of what he’s after. But then it appears — in the case of an enemy fighter, ‘‘silent as a shark’’ — and immediately it tries to escape or to turn on him. He struggles to maintain sight of it, moving in close, so close he can’t miss. And when he hits, something vital shatters.

Amelia Boynton Robinson B. 1911

Defiance Defined Her

She was left for dead on the bridge in Selma.

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Amelia Boynton Robinson after she was beaten by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965.
Credit
Photograph by Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images

By Nikole Hannah-Jones

She was a woman frozen in time, her unmoving body, captured in grainy black-and-white snapshots, sprawled at the base of the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the 1965 march for voting rights in Selma, Ala. In one photo, she’s cradled by a fellow marcher, his face a mask of agony. In another, a helmeted officer stands over her slack frame, a gas mask in one hand, a billy club in the other. Someone told a trooper she was dead, and he instructed the marchers to drag her body to the side of the road.

But the woman in that picture was not dead. In fact, though she was 53 at the time of the beating, Amelia Boynton Robinson would defiantly go on living another five decades. Defiance was, and always would be, the defining characteristic of her life.

Born in Savannah, Ga., Boynton Robinson was reared in a family of black entrepreneurs and landowners who refused to know their place in the feudal South. When she was 10 in 1921, shortly after the passage of the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote, Boynton Robinson struck out with her mother to hand out leaflets encouraging black women to exercise their new right in a region where trying to cast a ballot if you were black could cost you your life.

By the time Boynton Robinson graduated from the renowned Tuskegee Institute and started working in Selma, Ala., a reign of white terror, economic retaliation, poll taxes and literacy tests had disenfranchised the city’s majority black population. Less than 1 percent of Selma’s voters were black, but Boynton Robinson was determined to be one of them. In 1934, at the age of 23, Boynton Robinson, who worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, teaching rural black women food production and nutrition, became one of the few black voters in the state.

Once she and her husband, Sam Boynton, had secured their right to vote, they set to doing the real work: organizing the masses to do the same. The pair traveled to Montgomery to testify before the federal civil rights commission. The civil rights movement is often depicted as a battle over buses and soda fountains. But the most vicious violence was meted out to black citizens seeking to exercise political power. Black Southerners attempting to vote and organize voters were jailed, attacked by mobs, castrated and assassinated. Boynton Robinson and her husband told the commission about black citizens who were beaten and thrown off plantations where they worked because they attended voter-registration clinics the couple operated. The commissioners warned them to take the back roads home.

It was Boynton Robinson who persuaded the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to come to Selma to help organize voting efforts. By then she ran a real estate agency, and after she turned half her office over to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, she saw a steady stream of activists — among them Fred Shuttlesworth, C.T. Vivian, Andrew Young, Constance Motley and of course King — plotting around her family’s dining-room table.

It was radical and dangerous work. She received bomb threats; white people in town tried to wreck her business and retaliated against black neighbors who associated with her. Yet when she was arrested for trying to register black voters, Boynton Robinson simply said she was earning her ‘‘diploma.’’ When one night the Ku Klux Klan threw a brick through her window, she read the attached note, turned to the two nieces she was raising and said, ‘‘They are afraid of us.’’

In 1964, when civil rights workers were disappearing and black Southerners were brutalized and killed for trying to vote, Boynton Robinson ran for Congress. That year she became the first black woman in Alabama’s history to seek a congressional seat, and the first woman of any race to run on the Democratic ticket in the state. She lost, but she used her campaign to show that black Southerners wanted to vote yet were punished if they tried.

A year later, in hopes of raising national attention to the issue of voting rights, Boynton Robinson, King and other activists decided to organize a march to take their grievances the 50 miles from Selma to the governor’s office in Montgomery. On the morning of March 7, Boynton Robinson felt a pang of something unusual. ‘‘I was afraid,’’ she wrote in her autobiography, ‘‘Bridge Across Jordan.’’ She reminded herself that others had already given their lives for the struggle. Then she stepped in line with the marchers, third from the front.

After walking six blocks to the foot of Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, Boynton Robinson watched in terror as state troopers attacked. While marchers around her fell under the blows of batons and cattle prods, she thought to herself that the horses ridden by some of the troopers were more humane than the officers. At least, she wrote, they ‘‘stepped over the fallen victims.’’

One trooper spotted the statuesque Boynton Robinson and called out that he had found the ‘‘damn leader.’’ She was struck, first in the arm, then the head, knocked unconscious and tear-gassed. Journalists snapped photo after photo. These images of a nameless middle-aged black woman left for dead shook a nation in denial. They exposed the violent hypocrisy of the world’s greatest democracy brutally denying millions of its citizens the right to vote. Five months later, Boynton Robinson stood in the White House as President Johnson signed the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act into law.

Boynton Robinson, who outlived three husbands, continued to fight for civil rights over the next five decades, though she never became a household name. This March, during the 50th anniversary of what came to be called Bloody Sunday, Boynton Robinson, frail, in a wheelchair, yet resplendent in a sky blue gown, crossed that same span of bridge where she had nearly died. This time, however, she was clasping the hand of the president.

It is difficult to think of anyone with a better vantage point to assess our nation’s progress in atoning for its original sin than a 104-year-old black woman born in the Deep South. And so it must have been with both marvel and dismay that she crossed that bridge with a black man twice elected to the nation’s highest office, in the very state that just two years before was at the center of the Supreme Court case that gutted the Voting Rights Act she had bled for. She was elated to meet the president, her son, Bruce Carver Boynton, said from his Selma home. But she wasn’t much interested in all the looking back. ‘‘She was more concerned about the things that hadn’t changed,’’ he said. Having borne witness for more than a century, Boynton Robinson understood that the arc of the universe, which King said bends toward justice, might not be an arc at all, but rather a circle. Without vigilance, it would turn back on itself.

A few hours before Barack Obama was elected president in November 2008, I was waiting for a friend at the Old Ebbitt Grill, a block from the White House, when the bartender pointed out a distinctive-looking man several seats down. He was short and round with a ruddy face that seemed a couple of sizes too big, framed with long, wavy white hair that settled onto the shoulders of his double-breasted suit. He was holding a champagne flute. The overall effect was of an Oompa Loompa running the tables in Monaco circa 1965. ‘‘You know who that is?’’ the bartender said. ‘‘That’s Georges de Paris — the president’s tailor.’’

Maybe she was setting me up for a mark; de Paris had a reputation for regaling the Old Ebbitt’s tourist-heavy clientele with his life story and then waiting for someone to pick up the tab. Still, the story was a bargain at the price of a drink. De Paris, he told anyone who would listen, grew up in a wealthy family in Marseilles. His father, a judge, was shot dead in front of him when de Paris was 14. During World War II, he was a child messenger for the Resistance. He found himself penniless and homeless in Washington sometime around 1960, but within the decade he was running his own tailor shop and counted among his clients the Louisiana congressman Otto Passman, who sent along his compliments to Lyndon Johnson.

So began de Paris’s long, albeit informal, service at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. When reporters discovered him early in George W. Bush’s first term, de Paris obligingly served up mildly gossipy stories about Nixon (he was ‘‘cordial,’’ de Paris once told a reporter), Ford (he ‘‘teased me about my small size by asking me whether I played on an American football team’’), Carter (‘‘he never said anything’’), Reagan (‘‘he gave me some red, white and blue jelly beans’’), Clinton (‘‘cold and always occupied’’) and both Bushes (‘‘like father, like son. No. 43 prefers dark gray and navy, while No. 41 always wore medium gray’’).

De Paris’s handiwork — Old World in aesthetic and craft, four-digit in price — was expertly fitted to official Washington’s sartorial norms, which are both rigidly conservative and carefully attuned to subtle cues of wealth and prestige. At one point that evening at the bar, I asked de Paris, maybe a bit too jokingly, if he had any advice on achieving ‘‘the presidential look.’’ He put his hand on my shoulder and fixed me with a stern, fatherly gaze. ‘‘I can make you the president’s suit,’’ he said. ‘‘But I cannot make you the president.’’

Variations on this line, I later learned, appear in more than one of the many interviews de Paris gave over the years. The details of his early life were routinely reported as fact, but the particulars were always a bit slippery from one telling to the next. A French reporter noted that his accent seemed, well, a little off. But it was only after de Paris died in hospice in September that a Washington Post reporter named Megan McDonough located his sister and a great-nephew, who informed her that de Paris was born Georgios Christopoulos — that he was not the son of a wealthy judge in Marseilles but rather of a poor farmer in Kalamata, Greece.

It’s this final revelation that makes de Paris, in retrospect, the perfect Washingtonian, a sort of affectionate avatar of his adopted city. Most of Washington’s professional class arrives as some form of impostor: 23-year-old legislative aides pretending to understand sugar-cane tariffs, small-town businessmen swept half-wittingly into House Intelligence Committee seats, campaign speechwriters with newly minted administration jobs planning the invasion of countries they’ve never visited. It is a city where the social and professional fabric is held together by the unspoken agreement that nobody look too closely at anyone else’s bona fides.

This is often an appalling way to run a country. But Georges de Paris — a benign, winking sort of fabulist (did he really expect us to believe the bit about the Resistance?), who managed to talk and stitch his way into the half-dressed company of several leaders of the free world — embodied the spirit of the capital at its most perversely admirable. In the culture of Washington, success is measured less by how you acquire proximity to power than by what you do once you get it. Who was Georges de Paris, really? Maybe the better question is: How good were the suits?

Augusta Chiwy B. 1921

Going Silent

She saw so much and could say so little about it.

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Augusta Chiwy as a nursing student, front row center, at St. Elisabeth Hospital in Leuven, Belgium, in 1943.
Credit
Photograph from Martin King

By Ruth Padawer

In late December 1944, as German bombs rained on the Belgian town Bastogne, an American Army surgeon named Jack Prior banged on the door of a local home, desperate for help. He had heard a nurse lived there. When a middle-aged gentleman cautiously opened the door, the surgeon asked if the man’s daughter could join him at the Army’s makeshift hospital close by.

Prior knew Augusta Chiwy was black — her father was Belgian, her mother Congolese — and he knew the American Army prohibited black nurses from treating its white soldiers. But he reasoned that volunteers weren’t bound by Army rules. And anyway, he needed help.

The situation at the hospital was dire. The only medics for the 50 or so wounded soldiers were Prior, a dentist and another volunteer nurse. The team had run out of morphine and bandages, and only one can of ether remained. Electricity and running water had been cut off by the Germans, who were quickly surrounding Bastogne. This was the Battle of the Bulge, one of the deadliest of the war.

Chiwy, then 23, was home for what was supposed to be a short Christmas break from her job as a general nurse 100 miles away. That post had not prepared her for what she now saw: gaping shrapnel wounds, broken bones protruding through skin, men shaking, screaming and dying, with no medication to alleviate their pain.

The other nurse, a white Belgian who couldn’t bear gore, focused on bathing and feeding the men. But Chiwy assisted Prior in everything, packing men’s intestines back into their abdomens and wrapping their wounds with ripped bedsheets. After local residents told them about a large supply of cognac beneath town hall, Chiwy and Prior used it as both antiseptic and anesthetic.

When Prior found gangrene on a soldier’s hand and foot, Chiwy, who was only 4-foot-8, gave the man cognac, then held him down as Prior sawed off the appendages with a standard-issue serrated knife. She and Prior also went to the battlefield to retrieve the wounded, as snow and earth flew up around them whenever machine-gun fire struck nearby.

On Christmas Eve, a 500-pound bomb hit Prior’s hospital. As the building buckled, 30 wounded men were killed, as was the white nurse. She would be called heroic and dubbed the Angel of Bastogne. Chiwy wouldn’t be acknowledged until decades later.

The explosion blew Chiwy through a glass wall, but she ignored her cuts and helped pull survivors from the smoldering heap. She then fled to her father’s empty home. The attacks continued as she crouched in the corner of the basement, shaking uncontrollably. Even after she crept out of the cellar, something inside her seemed to shut down.

With his hospital demolished, Prior moved to a bigger American military-aid station a half-mile away, where 600 wounded soldiers, many with gangrene, lay on a straw-and-dirt floor in what was once an indoor riding hall for cavalry practice. The handful of medics were utterly overwhelmed, so Chiwy joined them to do what she could. Besides, she adored Prior. Many of those soldiers were from the Deep South, and they recoiled from her, saying they didn’t want a black person touching them. Prior snapped back that they had a choice: be treated by Chiwy or be left to die.

Though Chiwy worked hard, she talked less and less. In early January, when a soldier near her was blown up by a land mine, she tried to scream, but no sound came out.

On Jan. 17, 1945, Prior left Bastogne to follow his division. Chiwy was devastated and fell mute. Her silence lasted two years. When she finally spoke again, she avoided discussing those days as an Army volunteer, even with her two children. It took her 20 years to return to nursing.

The historian Martin King had wondered who the uncelebrated black nurse at Bastogne was, and in 2007, he set out to find her. Eventually, he located Chiwy in a Brussels geriatric home and visited her weekly but for eight months could coax no details from her about the war: ‘‘She’d talk about the nice weather and the bad food, but whenever I’d ask about Bastogne, she’d just go quiet.’’ One day, she abruptly asked, ‘‘So, what do you want to know about Bastogne?’’ and Martin said: ‘‘Everything.’’ She said: ‘‘The corpses being stacked up outside the aid station. And the smell of death and blood and piss.’’

As she opened up, she seemed lighter, but waved off her heroism: ‘‘I was just a nurse. I did what I had to do.’’

Mira Rothenberg B. 1922

Light in Darkness

She believed that even the most damaged children could be saved.

Photo

Mira Rothenberg with her son, Akiva, in the 1960s.
Credit
Photograph from Akiva Goldsman

By Akiva Goldsman

Occasionally I encounter someone who has read my mother’s book ‘‘Children With Emerald Eyes,’’ about the work she did with emotionally disturbed children. The person inevitably says, ‘‘Wait. … I know you, you’re the baby.’’ They don’t know me, of course. What they are referring to is my early life in the group home for troubled children that my parents created in our brownstone in Brooklyn Heights in the 1960s. In my mother’s book, published in 1977, some child is always banging the baby against the wall or hanging the baby out the window.

Starting in the late 1950s and until last year, my mother, Mira Rothenberg, worked as a therapist for children with diagnoses of schizophrenia and autism. Many of them had also been badly abused. She was known for being able to reach even the most locked-in kids. ‘‘Children With Emerald Eyes’’ was published in eight languages and became required reading for many in the field. Boys and girls from around the world arrived to be treated in her office in our home.

With so many other children sharing the stage, it may come as no surprise that her relationship with me, her only child, was complex. My mother grew up in Vilnius, Lithuania, in the 1920s and ’30s. When she was young, her mother and two younger siblings immigrated to New York, leaving my mother and her father to follow. But the details of my grandfather’s capture and execution, and my mother’s escape by ship to America at age 16 in 1939, were always shifting. I don’t know how she managed to locate her mother and siblings in Manhattan. I am also unclear as to the exact length of time (two hours; two years) between when my mother found her mother and when my grandmother hanged herself in the bathroom.

My mother studied education and psychology at Brooklyn College and Columbia University, where she discovered her vocation. She was recruited at Columbia to work with European children whose parents, hoping to keep them out of Nazi hands, had sent them away to fend for themselves. The children had just now come to be schooled in America (an assignment she received because she spoke seven languages). She made no secret of finding something familiar there, a pain she recognized. Among these children with lives wrecked by anguish, my mother felt at home.

Once these children were resettled, she turned to others. New York offered no shortage of terrible suffering all its own. My mother, having received her master’s degree in psychology, was now a budding therapist and made herself the first port of call for the worst cases. There was the little girl whose parents tried to change her complexion by dousing her with boiling oil. There was the boy whose parents kept him in a closet that was both bedroom and toilet. Faced with their nightmare worlds, many would have turned away from these children. My mother had the opposite response; she wanted to take them home. A weekly therapy session could do little in the face of horrendous home lives where neglect or abuse could be repeated.

She and my father, who was also a therapist, set up a summer program in upstate New York for about a dozen of their most disturbed patients. These children, removed from their homes and placed in a therapeutic lattice of loving relationships, showed progress. For my mother, the next step was obvious: moving the disturbed children (forever after known simply as ‘‘the kids’’) into our brownstone on State Street. And so our family home became a living experiment in the application of therapeutic environments. I was 2 at the time.

My house was a carnival of violent outbursts, fights, raging birth parents and late-night visits by the good officers of the 84th Precinct. I can remember my mother, one day sitting with me on the stoop of our brownstone, barefoot and puffing a Kool, wild black hair flying. I’m maybe 4 and have again just been terrorized to within an inch of my life by one of the kids. ‘‘I’m sorry,’’ she’d say, with that odd combination of dismissiveness and utter pathos that was her unique way of making me — and countless others over her lifetime — think we could tell her anything. ‘‘Can you forgive me?’’

In my mother’s view, there was no madness in our house. She believed that abuse or severe neglect, especially on the part of a parent, broke a child’s mind and heart. Her work convinced her that these children, like many victims, came to believe that the horrors committed upon them were their own fault. They no longer believed they deserved love. They no longer believed they should survive. My mother set out to prove them wrong.

One child wouldn’t stop shielding his head with his hands because his mother had tried to crush his skull with a hammer. My mother adorned him with a saucepan helmet until she could convince him that his thoughts were not evil, not worthy of murder. Another wouldn’t eat because she had been poisoned as a toddler. Only after my mother sampled every bite of her food for months did the girl abandon her struggle to starve herself to death.

But I wasn’t damaged enough to hold my mother’s full attention. Early on, she hired a woman named Elizabeth Lee to mother me. Just up from Boydton, Va., Elizabeth fed me and sheltered me from the chaos of my own home.

By the time I was 6, the experiment was over. The kids moved into a group home down the block run by my parents. Other group homes, schools, residences and summer programs followed. My parents ran them together, in offices side by side, for 30 years, even after they divorced. And though I had hoped that after the kids left there would be more time with my parents, my house seemed oddly empty.

Decades later, my mother and I sat on that same stoop. No more cigarettes, wild hair gone white. ‘‘What were you thinking, Mom, bringing all those crazy kids here to live with us?’’ I asked. She laughed, but her eyes were searching. ‘‘Can you forgive me?’’

In that moment, my mother revealed herself. This wasn’t the supplication I had always imagined. It was a challenge. For my mother, understanding others’ suffering was an act of self-preservation. I wonder now if that was what she was looking for all along: her just reward for the many lives she tried to heal. The boy on the stoop forgives his mother. The dead forgive the living. The living forgive the dead for dying. If she could undo all the horrors the world could dole out, then maybe she could be forgiven for having managed the unthinkable. For having survived.

Philip Levine B. 1928

People’s Poet

Communicating with my father through verse.

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Philip Levine in the early 1980s.
Credit
Photograph by Kelly Wise

By Natasha Trethewey

I inherited a love of Philip Levine’s poetry from my father — Eric Trethewey, a poet himself, who counted Levine among his favorite contemporaries. I remember the moment it began, that profound appreciation being passed down: One evening in my childhood, after my parents divorced, my father called to read to me Levine’s ‘‘Animals Are Passing From Our Lives.’’ As I listened to my father’s voice, I was enthralled and horrified by the vivid description, from the point of view of a pig being led to market: the sour, grooved block … /the blade that opens the hole/and the pudgy white fingers/that shake out the intestines/like a hankie. I heard too the delight and sadness in my father’s voice as he intoned the poem’s defiant closing words: No. Not this pig.

I knew that my father was drawn to those words, and to Levine, because of the way Levine’s poems captured with dignity and tenderness not only the ordinary daily experience of working-class people but also their often hard-edged existence — the pig standing in for the laborers who are forgotten or overlooked.

Levine had done quite a bit of labor himself. He was born in Detroit in 1928, a twin and one of three sons of Russian-Jewish immigrants. His father, who sold auto parts, died when he was 5. Growing up in that industrial metropolis during the Depression, he began a series of blue-collar jobs at 14. He worked at a soap factory and a bottling plant, at Chevrolet Gear and Axle and then at Detroit Transmission. He hefted crates, manned a punch machine, operated a jackhammer. From those early experiences, he forged his commitment to writing about the lives of working-class people: ‘‘I saw that the people that I was working with … were voiceless in a way,’’ he once explained. ‘‘In terms of the literature of the United States, they weren’t being heard. Nobody was speaking for them.’’

Photo illustration by Craig Cutler for The New York Times

Those laborers were the same people from whom my father and I had also come: among them, my great-grandfather who worked as a blacksmith, my grandmother who worked as a seamstress, an uncle who worked in the slaughterhouse. Over the years, my father and I would often quote lines of poetry as responses to each other, but those closing words in particular became an anthem for us. He would repeat them, chuckling, whenever such defiance was necessary — a playful edge that linked us in our beliefs about the dignity of work and the people who did it.

Long after that first encounter with Levine’s po­etry, I headed to graduate school to get my M.F.A. It was 1991 and Levine had published ‘‘What Work Is,’’ the volume for which he was awarded his second National Book Award. To bolster my library, my father bought me a copy. I understood that the handful of books my father chose to give me were meant to be my constant companions and, in many ways, my teachers. From the title poem I found the phrase I would begin to use to answer my father, continuing our tradition: ‘‘Forget you,’’ I’d say. ‘‘You don’t know what work is.’’ Like the poem’s speaker, my father and I each have a brother who is a laborer. Between us, those words were meant to be humbling — a reminder of the working-class jobs our brothers hold, the intellectual work we do as poets and the tenderness that links us to each other.

Philip Levine was for me a literary ancestor, a kind of poetry ‘‘father.’’ I can’t think of him now, no matter how I try, without thinking of my own father, who died just over a year ago: two fine animals passed now from our lives.

Albert Maysles B. 1926

A Way of Seeing

He captured reality in the service of storytelling.

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Albert Maysles working as a cinematographer in France in 1965.
Credit
Photograph from Maysles Films

By Errol Morris

I guess I always considered the Maysles brothers my enemies. It goes back to 1978 and the making of my first film, “Gates of Heaven.” I rented editing facilities from Albert and David. Just a small room in their Manhattan penthouse, outfitted with a 16-millimeter Steenbeck flatbed machine.

The brothers were successful filmmakers commissioned to do corporate documentaries and commercials. David handled sound; Albert worked the camera. (Albert went on to make nearly 20 films after David died in 1987.) They got their start making journalistic documentaries behind the Iron Curtain and then linked up with a collective of filmmakers — D.A. Pennebaker, Robert Drew et al. — trying to present life unmediated. By the time I knew them, they were the brand name in reality filmmaking. They had chronicled the Soviet Union, followed Orson Welles to Spain, filmed a visit with Truman Capote and documented the opening shots of the British Invasion — the Beatles’ first trip to New York.

I suppose I was an upstart. (I had a bet with Werner Herzog who said he would eat his shoe if I could finish a film.) I didn’t really know the films the Maysleses had made, but I wasn’t interested in the practice of vérité or direct cinema for which they were known. They used available light and a hand-held camera. They conducted no interviews. They wanted to say they weren’t directors: They were observers presenting reality.

I saw us on opposite ends of the spectrum. I was posing everything, lighting everything, changing décor to suit my own purposes, having people look directly at the camera. To me, the Maysles brothers were all about surfaces, while I was focused on what lies beneath. Lack of lights, I thought, does not a more meaningful or truer representation make. I know they felt similarly about me — Albert said in an interview that my films were devalued by my “trying to be ‘a good filmmaker.’ ”

I finally watched their film “Salesman” nearly 30 years after it was made in 1969. “Salesman” introduces us to four Bible salesmen as if they are characters in a piece of dramatic fiction — the Badger, the Gipper, the Rabbit and the Bull. The landscapes are bleak, and the salesmen desperate and competing with each other. A sales manager ruefully says, as if to no one, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” The Bible salesmen reflect on what you’ve just seen, on how good a job they did and on why they did or didn’t make a sale.

As I watched, I realized that the Maysles brothers had created something new and different. They weren’t just capturing a stream of events. They were giving their subjects a space to reflect. They weren’t just slavishly practicing direct cinema. They were showing us something about subjectivity, about how we define ourselves in the presence of another.

In their best films, there’s this kind of feedback loop. Take “Gimme Shelter,” the Rolling Stones concert film that doubles as a snuff film. (The camera captured a man in the crowd being stabbed to death.) There’s an incredible scene of Mick Jagger watching listlessly as the killing spools out on the editing-studio monitors. Or “Grey Gardens,” in which Jacqueline Onassis’ cousin Little Edie Beale almost constantly poses and performs. In such scenes, it’s clear that, along with his brother, Albert Maysles wasn’t just immersing us in a world of appearances; it was a world reflecting on itself cinematically. We were looking at people looking at themselves. He made us aware that what we were seeing was a representation of reality rather than reality itself. He called awareness to artifice.

Some critics took issue with the Maysles’ interactions with their subjects, even saying their movies were posed. But what does that mean? That some furniture was moved? Some scenes were edited out? There is an overwhelming sense of the real in their movies. The scenes in which subjects acknowledge or struggle with their subjectivity are those that reveal the most about them and about us all.

I was wrong to think the Maysles and I were opposites. I was mistaking differences in implementation with differences in intent. They and I were engaged in a similar enterprise. The role of documentary film is not to give us reality on a plate. We have plenty of our own reality to deal with. It should make us think about reality. Albert and David Maysles were exquisite practitioners of that art.

Stuart Scott B. 1965

Booyah!

The ESPN anchor changed the way we talk about sports.

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Stuart Scott in 1993.
Credit
Photograph by Rick LaBranche/ESPN

By Cord Jefferson

People tend to be oblique when they remember how Stuart Scott talked. ‘‘The way he spoke,’’ Suzy Kolber, a longtime ESPN host and reporter, told me, ‘‘hadn’t really been done before.’’ In its obituary for Scott, USA Today praised his ‘‘unique phrasing.’’ In a White House statement, President Obama mourned Scott and said the anchor brought to television ‘‘a new way to talk about our favorite teams.’’ All those accounts, and the others like them in the days and weeks after Scott died in January, were polite ways of saying this: Stuart Scott sounded black. For a time, at America’s most-beloved sports network, that was revolutionary.

Scott was a local news reporter in Orlando, Fla., until he was tapped in 1993 to join ESPN. His first real assignment came from the fledgling ESPN2 network, an attempt at young, irreverent sports coverage in the age of grunge. Almost immediately, it was clear that Scott wasn’t what ESPN viewers had come to expect. Overwhelmingly composed of youngish, handsome-­ish white men with names like Bob and Dan and Chris, ESPN of the early 1990s was a place where few blacks who weren’t athletes or former athletes seemed welcome. Scott, with his sleepy eyes and high-top fade, looked different from most of his co-hosts.

And when he opened his mouth, he confirmed just how different he actually was. Chris Berman brightened broadcasts with his punny, dad-joke nicknames (‘‘John ‘I Am Not A’ Kruk’’). Keith Olbermann, a Cornell graduate, preferred literary references. Scott, on the other hand, sounded like the 20- and 30-­something black men who congregated at my barbershop on Saturday afternoons to tell jokes and stories. ‘‘He must be the bus driver, ’cause he was takin’ him to school!’’ was one of many Scott lines that could have been cribbed from Def Comedy Jam. Scott called the Serbian basketball player Vlade Divac ‘‘Vlade Da Di,’’ a reference to the Slick Rick song ‘‘La Di Da Di.’’

Photo illustration by Craig Cutler for The New York Times

I hate sports. When I was growing up, that was an aversion that made me a deviant in my household, which rooted for Buckeyes football, Arizona Wildcats basketball and Andre Agassi. Even if my family’s teams weren’t playing on a particular day, the sound of ‘‘SportsCenter’’ frequently buzzed in the background of our home, like the hum of air conditioning. I grew to resent the show’s theme music the same way I resented my morning alarm clock. But once Scott joined the cast — first as a late-night co-host and eventually in prime time — I started to thaw. Though I still didn’t like sports, I would join my father and my brothers in hijacking Scott-isms to spice up our own highlight reels. When I emerged from my room in a tuxedo for my first homecoming dance in high school, my dad smiled and said I looked ‘‘cooler than the other side of the pillow.’’ I’ve now heard Scott’s most ­famous catchphrase — a bellowed ‘‘Booyah!’’ — used everywhere from playgrounds to a bizarre porn film my friend once sent me in college. (Despite the common pronunciation, Scott’s colleagues say he spelled it ‘‘boo-yow’’ in scripts.)

Scott’s trademark style rubbed many ESPN fans the wrong way. In 2003, USA Today readers made Scott their first choice in a poll asking which anchor should be banished from ‘‘Sports­Center.’’ The complaints were varied, but a careful observer could read their subtext: ‘‘Scott thinks we watch the show to hear his stupid catchphrases, most of which we do not understand’’; ‘‘He turns the sports news into his current-­slang version of events’’; ‘‘Scott is very knowledgeable about sports, but the way he presents them in hip-hop fashion is obnoxious.’’ Seeing the constant digs leveled at Scott, Kolber says she and another co-­worker once staged ‘‘a little intervention’’ one evening early in Scott’s career. ‘‘I don’t think it was wanting to say, ‘Don’t be yourself,’ ’’ she says. ‘‘It was more, ‘If you toned it down a little bit, the sky’s the limit.’ ’’ Though Scott heard them out, Kolber says, ‘‘he had no intention of listening to any of that.’’

Scott never changed his approach. But Rich Eisen, who joined Scott at ESPN in 1996, told me that the scorn from some white viewers didn’t go entirely unnoticed. Eisen remembers co-­hosting ‘‘SportsCenter’’ with Scott when Eisen dropped an esoteric ‘‘Seinfeld’’ reference on the air. At the commercial break, Scott turned to him and asked, ‘‘What was that?’’ ‘‘I said, ‘Well, that was from ‘‘Seinfeld’’ last week,’ ’’ Eisen says. Scott’s response: ‘‘Come on, man — brothers don’t watch ‘Seinfeld.’ ’’ Eisen says Scott’s point was clear. ‘‘What that meant was, How come my reference being lost on a large portion of the public was O.K.? How come that’s fine if I do it when it’s ‘Seinfeld,’ but if he does it with the latest LL Cool J song, that’s a problem?’’

Jim Bailey B. 1938

The Illusionist

A singer who refused to be categorized.

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Jim Bailey in 1972.
Credit
Norman Seeff

By Choire Sicha

It took three hours of hard labor for Jim Bailey to prepare to step onstage. ‘‘He was a brilliant impersonator,’’ said Carol Burnett, who had Bailey as a guest on her CBS variety show in the 1970s, ‘‘and he was one of the few who didn’t lip-sync to somebody’s recordings. He could sing like Judy, he could sing like Barbra, he sounded exactly like Phyllis.’’

Bailey did it on all the TV shows, with Lucille Ball and Ed Sullivan, and he did it at Carnegie Hall and the Flamingo. And when he did it live as Judy Garland with the real Liza Minnelli, the audience wept. It was never a ruckus. His mode of performance as a woman was elegance and dignity, and so he dove through the gender mirror without making a ripple in phobic America.

‘‘When he is present in the character, he is completely become the character,’’ said Sharon Gless, an actress and friend. ‘‘That’s who he is — that’s who she is. He no longer exists.’’

Bailey’s odd and novel career prospered at a time when comedians and singers could ping-pong about a network of variety shows, casinos, cabarets, Broadway productions and TV guest slots. A young Arsenio Hall opened for him; Rex Reed and Ed Sullivan popped up at a show of his at the Waldorf Astoria, shaking hands with Bailey’s mother and father.

‘‘I still think it’s amazing he managed to perform on ‘The Tonight Show’ in drag, you know?’’ said Stephen Campbell, Bailey’s manager of 27 years and his lover for 13. ‘‘I’m being blunt, but that’s what it is. Entertainment is going backward in a way.’’

Bailey soon discovered that oddity and novelty can also be a trap. ‘‘I just think you should forget the other stuff and go on as a boy,’’ Andy Warhol told Bailey in Interview magazine. He did want that, yes. ‘‘I guess he just couldn’t get where he wanted to get, because of that drag of the drag,’’ said his younger brother, Claude Bailey. ‘‘It was like after the show, these people would pile back into the dressing rooms, and they were throwing cards around and names. They all wanted a piece, then they all went away.’’

Campbell said, ‘‘I think he did very well, considering what society tells us about men in drag.’’ And very well, too, for — whatever he was! Bailey was briefly married to a woman; according to Warhol’s diaries, he dated Lucie Arnaz. Gless said: ‘‘Was he gay? I assume! I didn’t care! Out of courtesy to him, and the flirtation that went on with the two of us, I never brought it up.’’

It feels equally restrictive to name Bailey as anything or as nothing. Instead, we might just embrace the fact that on ‘‘Night Court’’ he gorgeously played a person once named Chip who was later named Charlene — almost 30 years before ‘‘Transparent.’’

The Hollywood author Jackie Collins (b. 1937) began raising eyebrows with the publication of her first steamy novel, ‘‘The World Is Full of Married Men,’’ in 1968. The book was banned in Australia and South Africa. Even after 30 New York Times best sellers, some things didn’t change. ‘‘I am still shocking people today, and I don’t know why,’’ Collins liked to say. ‘‘Is it because I’m a woman talking about sex and men?’’

It’s a strange moment when a friend who has died shows up on your phone. My friend Harris Wittels died in February, but his name still occasionally pops up in my email, my Gchat, my Facebook feed and my text messages. It hurts, because for a second, I forget what has happened, and then this electronic ghost forces me to remember all over again.

What do you do? Are you supposed to delete the friend from your phone? It feels mean. The person just died, now I have to ‘‘delete’’ him?

When these digital ghosts pop up, I usually end up going down a rabbit hole, scrolling through these old exchanges and remembering my friend.

I met Harris eight years ago, when we were performing standup comedy. I really enjoyed his work, and he opened some tour dates for me, and we eventually collaborated on several unproduced screenplays together. I loved Harris’s writing. A lot of comedy writing is not very funny, especially to other comedy writers. People invariably pitch similar versions of the same joke. In a writers’ room, a winning pitch is usually acknowledged with a chuckle that conveys ‘‘I see why that would work comedically’’ rather than with boisterous laughter.

Harris was a fantastic exception: His writing always made us laugh. A good comedy writers’ room is filled with talented people, but there is usually one really funny person to whom the room turns when you hit a wall. Harris was that person. His jokes were unexpected and bizarre and full of joy.

Once, in the ‘‘Master of None’’ writers’ room, we were trying to figure out a simple joke: Someone would give my character bad advice on what to text a woman who wasn’t responding to his texts. After a million rounds of pitching, Harris piped up: ‘‘What if he tells him to text her a photo of a turtle coming out of a briefcase and then quickly write ‘Wrong person’?’’

It was immediately clear that Harris’s line needed to go in the script and that the rest of us were wasting our time.

Another time we needed to figure out a set piece for when Colin Salmon, an eccentric actor, invites my character over to his apartment one evening. A million more pitches, no progress, until Harris chimed in, ‘‘What if he has a huge domino rally setup at his house, and he invites him over to knock them over, and then tells him good night and he just leaves?’’

We did that, too.

I’m glad we have the brilliant, but all too brief, output of his comedy. And despite the shock of seeing them pop up, I’m also glad I have all those emails and messages. This preserved record of our mundane, day-to-day, digital interactions helps remind me what it was like to have him in my life and what a sweet and hilarious man he was.

Here are bits of a Gchat exchange between Harris and his sister Stephanie. You didn’t look at Harris and immediately think ‘‘ladies’ man,’’ but he was genuine and fearless in what he would do to make someone laugh.

Harris: did i tell u i’m gonna be on the real world?

Stephanie: WHAT? NO

Harris: i talked to this girl at a bar all night and there were cameras on us.

Stephanie: did you do a bedroom scene???????

Harris: they were doing their job thing which was walking around with candy trays and trying to get tips and wearing these vests for a group called the ‘‘meow meows’’ and i said i’m in the ruff ruffs and she giggled and then she literally ripped my shirt off and put on her vest and gave me the tray

Stephanie: shut up!!!

Harris: and i started selling her candy and getting a lot of tips

Stephanie: Were there sparks?

Harris: mad sparks […] i was like whats yer name and she was like kimberly and i was like your last names burly? she loved it

I was Harris’s boss on ‘‘Master of None,’’ and if he had been anyone else he would have been fired immediately. He was reliably 15 to 30 minutes late and went on extended unauthorized phone breaks constantly. Once, my co-creator and I had to leave the writers’ room, so we put Harris in charge while we were gone. I later found out that shortly after we left, Harris told the room that they were done for the day, and everyone left. He was so talented and lovable that he knew all would be forgiven.

Before working with me, Harris spent many seasons writing for Mike Schur on ‘‘Parks and Recreation.’’ Consider how talented and charming someone must be to continue to maintain employment while engaging in texts like this:

Harris: Hey man I’m taking a in the basement.

Mike: I’m your boss.

Harris: Found a great vacant bathroom downstairs. Be back soon. You guys keep going.

Mike: I’m tweeting this if you don’t get up here in 30 seconds.

Harris was very open about his struggles with drugs. On an episode of the ‘‘You Made It Weird’’ podcast with Pete Holmes, Harris detailed how heroin became a part of his life. It’s a brutal story that only Harris could share in a way that is both heartbreaking and hilarious. You melt when you hear how, at a low point, Harris didn’t care about his life anymore. But minutes later, he makes you laugh as he recounts how people in a Los Angeles park were unknowingly having a lighthearted barbecue steps away from him just as he was making his first awkward foray into purchasing serious opiates.

Just before Harris died, we had plans to move to New York together to film ‘‘Master of None,’’ and we felt very inspired creatively. He had found a counselor in the city to help him stay sober. I was naïve about addiction and assumed that because he was so good about pursuing treatment, things would be fine. He always seemed so hopeful, and things were all pointed the right way. His mother, Maureen, forwarded me the final email she received from Harris, which he sent the same day he died of a heroin overdose.

i found a cool place to live in Manhattan. I feel good!! I am feeling very fortunate. Love you

Since Harris’s death, I’ve dug deeper into his podcast history just to hear his voice. I found one bit where he pretended to be calling from heaven. If there is a heaven, I hope it’s like this:

‘‘Hey, it’s Harris callin’ from heaven. Ahh, it’s pretty great up here. Ahh, it’s beautiful for starters. Hitler’s up here, however, for the vegetarianism thing so callin’ [expletive] on that. But other than that it’s pretty great. It is very cloudy. You sit on them so that’s cool. Oops gotta’ go, ice cream buffet!’’

The New York Times media critic David Carr (b. 1956) overcame a severe drug addiction to take his place as one of the most sharp-eyed and beloved journalists of his era. In his memoir, ‘‘The Night of the Gun,’’ he shared some insight: ‘‘The fundaments of the genre require me to run close and careful analysis on how exactly I reversed course from certain damnation and came to a professional life beyond all expectation. So here goes: I worked a lot.’’

Kathryn Barnard B. 1938

To Have and to Hold

She understood the unspoken language of babies.

Photo

Kathryn Barnard conducting a study at the University of Washington around 1980.
Credit
George Carkonen/The Seattle Times

By Kim Tingley

Oh, if anything happens to this baby, I’m just going to die myself, Kathryn Barnard thought. She nestled the infant against her warm body; as the hospital hummed and beeped around them, she tuned in to the small noises of his pulse, breath, bowels. Baby Kurt, just 10 months old, was very sick. His mother couldn’t stay with him, so Barnard, a young nursing student in the early 1960s, had been assigned his round-the-clock care. Twelve hours a day for five days, she soothed him and cradled him in her arms. Forty years later, she would say that this ‘‘very special event’’ inspired her life’s work. She never forgot how, the more she held him, the more she loved him.

A decade after Baby Kurt returned to his parents, recovered, Barnard embarked on a self-designed doctorate in ‘‘the ecology of early childhood’’ and immersed herself in the natural habitats of babies: tiny, displaced creatures struggling to make themselves understood and to understand. Rational, empathetic, absolutely devoted to children though she never had a child of her own, she had by then spent years visiting the homes of young people with developmental disabilities to help their families cope with their difficult behavior — for one overwhelmed mother, she scrubbed the kitchen floor — and had learned that being born prematurely was a major cause of cognitive delays. Preemies were housed in incubators, fed intravenously and, to avoid startling them and straining their fragile heart and lungs, were touched as infrequently as possible. But, she reasoned, if ‘‘difficulty adapting to extrauterine life’’ was the problem, a womblike atmosphere of steady thumping and gentle swaying might be the solution.

That’s how a bright-eyed, blunt-spoken Barnard came to appear before the engineers at the University of Washington Medical Instrument Facility brandishing specifications for a machine she had imagined: an incubator containing a ‘‘rocker bed’’ that glided forward and back and a speaker through which an eight-track tape played the sound of a heartbeat recorded as a continuous loop. She ran a small control trial that showed that her invention promoted restful sleep and weight gain and improved brain development. And though the rocker bed itself was never widely manufactured, rocking chairs, introduced to neonatal I.C.U.s based on Barnard’s work, are now standard in hospitals across the country.

A pioneer in the nascent field of nursing science, Barnard studied touch and concluded that infants communicate tactilely — and that cuddling with caretakers, as Baby Kurt had with her, is crucial to their mental and physical health. She then sought ways that nurses could help promote such bonding, especially among parents who are poor or depressed or have little family support or education and whose children are more likely to struggle academically and socially. ‘‘There’s probably no other profession where you have so much intimate contact with people,’’ she said. ‘‘Often we, not doctors, are the first to notice when something goes off track.’’ Always meticulous and wary of her own assumptions, she sent research assistants into the field with a novel tool — a camcorder — to record her subjects in situ and then searched the videos for points of intervention.

To view Barnard’s footage now is to look through her eyes, to see the numbing banalities of daily life acquire unexpected urgency. Aug. 21, 1990, 2:23 p.m.: A baby in a car seat cries, and a woman in baggy jean shorts kneels, hoists him, kisses his cheeks and coos, ‘‘What’s my big guy’s problem?’’ Sept. 11, 1990, 9:46 a.m.: A baby in footie pajamas sitting up on the carpet wails; a woman bends stiffly at the waist, drops a toy at the baby’s feet, pats the baby’s back and walks out of the frame. After cataloging such moments and studying their effects, Barnard devised checklists that tens of thousands of nurses have since used to assess caregiver-infant relationships and try to improve them: encouraging a mother to make eye contact while feeding her baby, say, or to teach him a game without losing her patience.

In a photograph taken around this time, Barnard lifts a newborn to her face. Her index finger cradles the baby’s head, a tiny foot rests on her bosom. The baby’s eyes are closed but look as if, in the next instant, they may flutter open to meet Barnard’s gaze, which has narrowed to exclude everything else in the room. Her brows are raised in inquiry, her lips are softly parted, her curls are mussed and her face is moist, as if she, too, has journeyed a great distance to be here, cupping a weary fellow traveler in her palm, poised to offer a welcome.

A parent becomes, at some point, this cross to bear. Your father is lame, your mother an embarrassment. And you are never, ever coming out of your room. If you don’t live on a sitcom, that rite tends to be private. The misery is yours to hide or share. The choice was never Bobbi Kristina Brown’s. She actually did live on a sitcom. ‘‘Being Bobby Brown’’ aired on Bravo in 2005, and filmed when Brown was around 11. Americans were invited to watch Bobbi Kristina’s parents, Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown, cause the occasional ruckus while drunk or horny or possibly high, not infrequently with their daughter in tow. This is to say that Bobbi Kristina didn’t have mere parenting to contend with. There was also the sale that her particular parents made of their fame and her girlhood.

In one episode of ‘‘Being Bobby Brown,’’ Brown and Houston go shopping at Harrods in London. He browses up a storm, gathering gawkers at every stop, performing his purchases at top volume from an invisible stage. Only next to him does Houston seem discreet. Even with her extraordinary voice in decline, she was one of Earth’s most famous people. In a department store, you would have noticed her, say, wearing an enormous fur hat, paying for a handbag with a wad of cash and disconcerting charisma, trailed by a camera crew.

The Houston-Browns don’t ‘‘take’’ Bobbi Kristina — they called her ‘‘Krissi’’ and ‘‘Bobbi Kriss’’ — to Harrods. She’s simply there, the way that fur hat is. In an elevator, Whitney has to remind Bobby that they’ve done no shopping yet for their daughter, who has turned her head away from the conversation. Her frustration is aimed at her father. She gives his face her palm. His needy obnoxiousness has clearly gotten on her last nerve. (He won’t stop being Bobby Brown.) But the Bobby and Whitney Show exceeds even regular triggers of normal tween vexation, like shopping with your mom, because your mom is Whitney Houston.

But it wasn’t just that. Bobbi Kristina’s legendary mother was also on drugs, and became famous for that, too. Her father was in and out of jail and charged with battery of Houston, who, on the show, supportively accompanies him to a court hearing in Dunwoody, Ga. She left him in 2007 and was found dead in a Beverly Hills bathtub in the winter of 2012. The official cause was drowning, but a toxicology report also discovered cocaine in her body.

Bobbi Kristina bore this unusually heavy cross during what should have been the best parts of her short life, defending her mother against accusations of addiction, outwardly steeling herself against the sorrow of losing her. Few of us will ever know what it’s like to live in public the way she was made to. (There she is, as an infant, in her parents’ arms at the end of the video for their 1993 duet, ‘‘Something in Common.’’) But more of us understand the longing for parental affection. In Bobbi Kristina’s case, love seemed so present (this was a daughter often photographed clinging to her mother; and as nicknames go, ‘‘Bobbi Kriss’’ always sounded the way cashmere feels) yet so complicated.

In January, in an eerie parallel to her mother’s death, Bobbi Kristina was found unconscious in a tub. For half the year, she languished in a coma. During those six months, the public speculated — Was it addiction? Or something more grisly? — but mostly grieved. She died in July. She was 22.

Yahoo recently announced that Bobbi Kristina was its No.1 most-searched-for term in 2015. Google had her name in its month-to-month Top 10 for most-searched people a quarter of the year. Maybe a taste for scandal drove some of that traffic. I would like to believe, though, that empathy and hope were the engine. As a teenager and young adult, Bobbi Kristina glowed. Her father’s exuberance and her mother’s ebullience seem to emanate from her pores. She had her daddy’s gap between her front teeth, only hers seemed wider. And when she spoke on-camera, she had grace. She sounded like a woman seeking to make something of herself, despite her affluence, not because of it.

Her life and death make you wonder whether fame should fall within epidemiology’s purview. It is like any other drug, and was so even for Houston, who strenuously rejected attention even as she occasionally charged into it. Bobbi Kristina was born with fame in her system. It might have come to seem like a sibling she was too loving to reject, part of the family no matter what. To that end, she made herself the emotional center of a second reality show: ‘‘The Houstons: On Our Own,’’ which began months after Whitney’s death and ran for 14 queasy episodes. Putatively, it was Bobbi Kristina trying to get her love life and career in order. But it seemed like reliving previous on-camera woe. Many children of famous people chronicle living in their parents’ shadows. Bobbi Kristina had to live in their light. She became famous, first by association and then by acclimation. She also wanted to act and make music. Made of stars, maybe she, too, contained something astral. We will never know.

In the premiere of ‘‘Being Bobby Brown,’’ Bobby has just arrived at a lavish hotel and is eager to reconnect with Houston, whom he hasn’t seen in over a month. As they enter their suite, Houston tells him that Bobbi Kristina is also there. He finds her hiding in a kitchen cabinet, hoping to surprise him. Seconds later, Houston and Brown are shown backing into the bedroom, and she intones to Bobbi Kristina that Mommy and Daddy are ‘‘gonna try to make a baby.’’ Leaning against the door, she pleads to be let in and, walking away, says, ‘‘That’s not fair.’’

Things never seemed quite fair for Bobbi Kriss. As she lay in her coma, with the world gawking at and pulling for her, her father’s sense of decorum finally kicked in. Bobby Brown released a statement: ‘‘Privacy is requested in this matter.’’ He wanted what any parent would. He just wanted it too late.

Roderick Toombs B. 1954

A Beloved Villain

He was the bad-guy wrestler we couldn’t stop rooting for.

Photo

Roderick Toombs at home in Oregon in 1985.
Credit
From Kitty Toombs.

By Taffy Brodesser-Akner

To best appreciate what Rowdy Roddy Piper meant to World Wrestling Entertainment, take in a few episodes of his talk show, ‘‘Piper’s Pit,’’ which appeared during the W.W.E.’s Saturday-morning show. He plays both wrestler and interviewer — a Phil Donahue of the singlet set. Things start out civilized (or seated, anyway), but within moments, Piper is throwing coconuts at Jimmy (Superfly) Snuka or baiting Hulk Hogan into a brutal fight with Boxing Bob Orton.

His exchange with Andre the Giant particularly delights. Piper, in a kilt (he was billed as a Scot despite being Canadian), sits back in a cheap office chair, bare knees akimbo, and asks Andre where he’s from. Andre doesn’t answer. Piper asks if he speaks English — and just in case he doesn’t, repeats the question loudly and slowly. ‘‘None of your business,’’ Andre answers, as the crowd starts to make noise, because those 25 seconds are longer than it typically takes for an interview to break down.

Piper (né Roderick George Toombs) was hired by the W.W.E. in 1984 as a manager. When he finally made it into the ring a year later, it was as a villain, to engage in vicious rivalries with everyone from Andre to Mr. T (at the height of his ‘‘A-Team’’ fame). His theatrical loathing for his opponent made the matches magnetic, and he became the most beloved hated man in the W.W.E. universe. And his ability to bring all those crazy feuds to life during his interviews energized story lines in a way the W.W.E. had never before been able to successfully pull off.

With Andre, Piper asks if it’s true that Big John Studd body-slammed him. No, Andre says, it isn’t. Piper, neck veins pulsing, suggests that even he could body-slam him. Interview over. Andre grabs Piper’s shirt, uses it to fling him across the room and walks off the set. Piper, red-hot with rage, screams, ‘‘You think you’re tough?’’ He stares into the camera and does an Incredible Hulk pose that shows off his terrifying trapezius muscles. ‘‘You ain’t nothing!’’ You have never seen a man so committed to seeming to have lost all control.

Piper never won a world championship, but he didn’t need to. He was the W.W.E.’s hero, his energy a shot of adrenaline into wrestling’s weary heart. In 2005, he was inducted into its Hall of Fame. And in July, when he died in his sleep from cardiac arrest at 61, it was hard not to think that he had used up all his energy prematurely, keeping all those other clowns afloat for so many years.

Elizabeth Wilson B. 1921

The Other Mother

She upended traditional maternal roles.

Photo

Elizabeth Wilson in the 1971 movie version of “Little Murders,” with Elliott Gould, center, and Vincent Gardenia.
Credit
20th Century Fox Film Corp./Everett Collection

By Anthony Giardina

Mike Nichols knew exactly what he was doing when he cast Elizabeth Wilson in ‘‘The Graduate.’’ It was a small role, as Benjamin Braddock’s mother, but it yielded the film’s single funniest and most satirically precise moment. Reacting to the news that her son is planning to marry Elaine Robinson (the daughter of the ur-cougar played by Anne Bancroft), Wilson lets out a shriek of weird, unmoored joy. Her schrei of relief makes us laugh while cluing us in to the film’s real subject: the terror felt by the middle-class world at the prospect of its own late ’60s unraveling.

At any other point in the century, her classic, patrician beauty would most likely have consigned Wilson to a much duller career: a series of thankless roles as the film hero’s bland, retiring mother. And she seemed headed in that direction — playing small, barely noticeable parts on film and stage — until she found herself in a lucky position, coming of age alongside a generation of satirists who picked up on her talent for absurdism, the inspired nuttiness through which she was able to convey a level of truth. Never a wife and mother herself (‘‘I didn’t want to give up my career,’’ she once explained), she came to define motherhood in the sorts of plays and films where the old apple-pie tropes of hearth and home were likely to take a beating.

In Alan Arkin’s 1971 film of Jules Feiffer’s play ‘‘Little Murders,’’ she played a housewife trying to maintain order in a dystopic New York where bands of hoods roam the streets and assassins point their rifles at any lit window. ‘‘How far better it is to strike a match than curse the darkness,’’ Wilson says brightly, hosting a dinner during a blackout. ‘‘Come and get it,’’ she sings. ‘‘I always said that to my children at mealtimes.’’

Those are the sorts of lines given to all the traditional mothers in Hollywood’s heyday, the ones she herself might once have played. Wilson spoke them with as much conviction as any movie mother; the difference was that there were rifles aimed at her hearth. In one scene in ‘‘Little Murders,’’ she takes out a scrapbook of pictures of her son, a survivor of Korea and Vietnam, ‘‘shot down in his tracks on the corner of 97th Street and Amsterdam Avenue.’’ She speaks as if her son’s murder should have earned him the Purple Heart, and her misplaced pride makes you laugh. The camera follows her into the kitchen, where she places her face in her hands and begins sobbing. A farcical character has just become — and before your very eyes — touchingly real.

It might be that her most indelible work was onstage, particularly her Tony-winning performance in David Rabe’s 1971 play ‘‘Sticks and Bones.’’ Rabe’s play is set in a simulacrum of the household of the ’50s sitcom ‘‘The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.’’ That is, the father and mother are named ‘‘Ozzie’’ and ‘‘Harriet,’’ the sons ‘‘David’’ and ‘‘Ricky.’’ But here Ricky is a guitar wielding thug-in-the-making, while David has returned from Vietnam, blinded and in thrall to the Vietnamese girl he left behind. The new, painfully real circumstances undo Ozzie but not Harriet — at least not at first. She continues serving fudge and ice cream to her family, as if in doing so, she could heal the world. Finally, Harriet cracks and lashes out at Ozzie, cursing him for teaching his sons ‘‘sports and fighting.’’

Rabe has written about how stunning it was in rehearsal to watch Wilson unleash her rage. But with this particular actress, you somehow knew that rage was never to be the end. After tearing into Ozzie, she set about helping him find aspirin for his headache. Watching, maybe you laughed a bit. Though even if you were rooting for the takedown of the Ozzie and Harriet world, you knew enough to hold back. Elizabeth Wilson had just shown you, in her own heartbreaking way, what Harriet stood to lose.

Sometime before Dorothy Jean LeVake was 5 months old, her mother — the child of a Broadway producer and herself a performer — announced to her husband that she planned to take the baby to central casting. As the daughter would later tell it, he warned her mother that if she did, he’d be gone when they returned. She did; he was. The baby, renamed Jean Darling, went into show business. Thereafter mother and daughter had only each other.

At 4, Jean Darling joined a group of child actors known as ‘‘Our Gang’’ and later, in the 1950s, when their movies were broadcast on television, ‘‘The Little Rascals.’’ Hal Roach had come up with the idea for the series while watching kids in a lumberyard play with pieces of wood. In the monochrome world of ‘‘Our Gang,’’ childhood is slapstick, riddled with pratfalls and knocks to the noggin. The kids, black and white, fat and scrawny, stage a circus, fly down streets in runaway cars, fall in love. Sometimes they’re rich, sometimes orphans, but they’re always running in a pack.

In the presound days, the cast, some too young to read, followed not scripts but directions shouted through a megaphone. Darling, who appeared in more than 30 ‘‘Our Gang’’ shorts, became known as the Most Beautiful Little Girl in Pictures, with incandescent platinum curls and a cupid’s-bow mouth, giggling, vamping, getting the boys to fight one another to prove their love.

‘‘There was no great ambition,’’ she said later. ‘‘Like other child stars, there was a key in my back. I’d been wound up by someone and was hitting all the marks.’’

Still, she said, her childhood wasn’t unhappy, just different. ‘‘A lot of people say their childhood was stolen,’’ she wrote in a 2014 interview on Reddit. ‘‘Mine was never stolen, I just worked a lot! I might have had more fun if my mother hadn’t spent all my money, but that’s it!’’

Before her teens, Jean Darling graduated to vaudeville, eventually touring with the U.S.O. during World War II and studying with the Municipal Opera Association in New York, before originating the role of Carrie Pipperidge in the 1945 Broadway production of ‘‘Carousel.’’ In the 1950s, she married a magician, had a baby and traveled the world as part of her husband’s act. ‘‘The reason I did that was because I had a little boy,’’ she said in an interview. ‘‘I saw all these people shipping their kids off to schools and everything, but I never did. I had my little boy with me.’’

She and the magician separated, and Darling took up a home in Ireland to write. She published dozens of crime and mystery stories in magazines. In ‘‘Angel Baby,’’ which appeared in ‘‘Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine’’ in 1978, an expat former-child-star-turned-singer-turned-author is stuck in the shabby garden flat of a once-grand house in Dublin. She has aged out of show business; a journalist who finds her is interested in only her earliest successes. ‘‘It was as though her life had been sawed off at age seven,’’ the narrator observes.

Darling outlived her fame, and then something like fame returned. The last decades of her life coincided with a renewed interest in silent movies in the United States and Europe. Jean Darling was invited to festivals all over, including to Slapsticon in Massachusetts, the Slapstick Festival in Bristol, England, and the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Italy. She attended them as a living, laughing, charming souvenir.

In 2009 at the ninth European convention of the Sons of the Desert, an international Laurel and Hardy appreciation society, she sat for an interview with René Riva, an actor and singer she met a year before at a Dutch convention. ‘‘I never have belonged,’’ she said. ‘‘Even to this day, I don’t belong anywhere. I have things that belong to me, like my animals. Actually in life, those are the only things that really belong to you. … People don’t; they come and go. Even children. They’re borrowed while they’re little, and then they go on and be themselves.’’

Eventually, she left Ireland to live in Germany, with that little boy she’d had, her son, Roy Hamilton-Bowen, who’d gone on to be himself — a professional philatelist and numismatist. His mother was ‘‘very disappointed,’’ he wrote in an email, that he hadn’t gone into show business.

A$AP Yams B. 1988

Secret Promoter

How to turn a friend into a superstar.

Photo

A$AP Yams in 2014.
Credit
Brock Fetch

By Amos Barshad

How does one 20-something nobody make another 20-something nobody into a star? Steven Rodriguez, better known as A$AP Yams, must have asked himself this question as he set out to turn his friend A$AP Rocky into New York’s most exciting rapper in a generation.

A couple of restless, artsy youths growing up in Harlem, Yams and Rocky met as teenagers and together energized a rap collective, A$AP, with a lofty backronym: Always Strive and Prosper. Rocky, a bright, handsome and stylish M.C., was always supposed to be the frontman. But Yams, who had the kind of manic goofball energy you might expect from someone who would choose a tuber as a stage name, was never far away. In the early videos, Yams quietly intrigued with his unfurled braids, his unmistakable port-wine birthmark, his I’ve-seen-some-stuff stare. And while his public face was that of the sidekick, he was, in fact, the Svengali.

Yams’s strategy was twofold. A voracious pop consumer and a dogged autodidact, he pushed Rocky out of the insular purism that had felled so many New York rappers before him. Hip-hop has long had a happy tradition of local superstars who act as champions of regional sounds. Rap blogs had, over the previous decade, made that music accessible beyond the dusty mixtape shacks, swap meets and popped Caprice trunks it once called home. And so, with Yams acting as his attaché, Rocky reached far west of the Hudson, incorporating into his music a wide swath of underground sounds — from Houston’s stuttering and syrupy chopped-’n’-screwed to the woozy and potent cloud rap of Oakland.

And while Rocky processed the raw material, Yams invented a buzz. He’d built a following on Tumblr by posting selections from a seemingly endless collection of obscure rap magazines. Once he had an audience and a reputation as a connoisseur, he started pushing Rocky’s music — a perfect distillation of every sound Yams’s community of online rap geeks was obsessing over at the time — without quite acknowledging that he so much as knew the guy.

The rise was swift and joyous to behold; no one imparted ambitious group-sex anecdotes with as much charm and glee as Rocky. But his ascent would be marked by tragedy. While by most accounts Yams’s struggles with drug abuse were longstanding, it’s hard to deny that heaps of money and untold access can be perilous.

When they think back on him, Yams’s friends talk about a guy who loved interacting with strangers online. Partly, this was strategic: One source of his power was knowing what 15-year-olds were into. But mostly this reflected his immense curiosity. If he respected your tastes — if he wanted to learn more — he’d reach out.

He was, in other words, an ideal Internet user: a cultural polyglot who found beauty in its expansiveness, and who took from it so much, and who gave back to it even more. That’s how he achieved his stated goal: Rocky became a star; his first studio album went gold. But Yams accomplished something else too. He reminded us that a life lived online doesn’t have to be aimless — that if you’re willing to dive in, there’s a mesmerizing logic to be found.

The film director Wes Craven (b. 1939) succeeded in scaring people half to death with blockbusters like ‘‘Nightmare on Elm Street’’ and ‘‘Scream’’ and their sequels. But he suggested that his slasher movies actually provided a public service. ‘‘Horror films don’t create fear,’’ he said. ‘‘They release it.’’

Lesley Gore B. 1946

You Would Cry, Too

She made songs about loving and losing sound triumphant.

Photo

Lesley Gore in the 1960s.
Credit
David Redfern/Redferns/Getty Images

By Rob Hoerburger

That first hit, ‘‘It’s My Party,’’ lasted just 2 minutes 21 seconds, and still the phrase came at us more than a dozen times, each one, it seemed, with a little more mustard: ‘‘I’ll cry if I want to, cry if I want to, cry if I want to.’’ Then, a few months later, there was ‘‘You Don’t Own Me,’’ its minor-key verse overswelling into a major-key chorus of ‘‘Don’t tell me what to do/Don’t tell me what to say.’’ With these declarations, Lesley Gore, the plucky teenager from Tenafly, N.J., brought a new kind of sisterly steeliness to the Top 40.

But there was something else going on, too, a quality in the voice — sockhop swing mixed with smoky afternotes of tenderness — if not in the actual words, that hinted at something she might have been trying to tell us, maybe even tell herself. In the summer of ’64, when she was 18 and holding her own on the charts at the height of Beatlemania, she enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College, a place known for seekers and dissenters. She studied English and American literature and initially stuck out for her pop bona fides: ‘‘I was a rock personality, which was not considered at all chic,’’ she said. ‘‘People at Sarah Lawrence were either into classical or folk music.’’ She still performed on the weekends and during vacations, and gradually the songs about unsuitable boys (‘‘Maybe I Know’’), about the need for self-reliance, took on a new dimension and authenticity, because over time, she realized she was gay.

By the time she graduated, though, pop music had changed, too. Gone were the days of hair flips and crinoline skirts, of songs that lasted just 2:21. Gore was now not just a gay woman trying to make her way in the music business, but also a 22-year-old has-been. She moved to Los Angeles and started writing more of her own material, often with her girlfriend at the time, the actress and writer Ellen Weston. But while pop music had become more ‘‘progressive,’’ America wasn’t quite ready to hear, at least from one of its former singing sweethearts, grown-up songs with maybe-gay subtexts like ‘‘Love Me by Name’’ and ‘‘Someplace Else Now.’’ She and Weston ‘‘were kicked out of more offices than you have hair on your head,’’ Gore said during one of her comeback attempts. She continued to mostly struggle, until 1980, when she wrote the words to ‘‘Out Here on My Own,’’ from the movie ‘‘Fame.’’ With lines like ‘‘I dry the tears I’ve never shown’’ and ‘‘I may not win, but I can’t be thrown,’’ the song became an anthem of empowerment for anyone who felt marginalized or discarded (and earned her, with her brother and co-writer, Michael, a Best Original Song Oscar nomination).

Gore did continue to sing ‘‘It’s My Party’’ and her other ’60s hits in concert, and one place her career experienced no lulls was my own house. ‘‘It’s My Party’’ was the first record I ever owned, and well into adulthood my two sisters and I continued to see her perform, in oldies big tents and intimate cabarets. We even used the unrepentant joy of Gore’s ‘‘Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows’’ as music therapy to help my young niece recover from a rare illness.

Like Gore, my sisters and I were following unconventional paths — single parent, Catholic nun, gay man — and I suspect we may have always connected to that searching quality in her voice. Leaving one of her concerts sometime in the ’80s, I turned to one of my sisters and said, ‘‘I think she must be gay,’’ though Gore had still not publicly come out. Years later, after she had hosted episodes of the L.G.B.T. newsmagazine ‘‘In the Life’’ and talked about her relationship with her longtime partner, a jewelry designer named Lois Sasson, she would nevertheless claim, ‘‘I can’t come out of the closet, because I was never really in it.’’ As Blake Morgan, a New York musician who knew Gore for almost 30 years, put it: ‘‘Sometimes when you slice into people, you get a little bit of them and then a little bit of someone else. When you sliced into Lesley, you just kept getting Lesley. She always said, ‘You gotta make your 16-year-old self proud.’ ’’

Claude Sitton B. 1925

Bearing Witness

He brought the civil rights struggle up close for readers.

Photo

Claude Sitton at The New York Times in 1964.
Credit
Eddie Hausner/The New York Times

By Sam Dolnick

Outside, the crickets chirped their summer song. Inside, Claude Sitton sat quietly in a pew. It was July 1962, a sticky night in a little wooden church in southwestern Georgia.

Sitton had been on the road for weeks, but tonight he was still, observing the scene intensely: the church’s pine floor, the wall calendar’s photograph of President Kennedy. He was with a group of three dozen black men and women gathered clandestinely for a voter-registration meeting, all listening to a pastor reading Scripture: ‘‘We are counted as sheep for the slaughter.’’

Then Sitton felt the air leave the room. Sheriff Zeke Mathews stepped through the church door, a dozen white police officers by his side. They clumped down the aisle.

Clumped. That was Sitton’s word.

‘‘We want our colored people to go on living like they have for the last hundred years.’’ Those were the sheriff’s words.

They were also the opening sentence of Sitton’s front-page article the next day in The New York Times, a riveting account of intimidation that captured the attention of the White House and the Justice Department, whose lawyers soon flew into town to sue Mathews. It wasn’t the first time, or the last, that Sitton’s work would have that sort of effect.

Sitton, a former copy editor at The Times — and the grandson of a Confederate tax collector — was now the leading reporter of the civil rights movement as the paper’s Southern correspondent. The day after the church story, Sitton wrote about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s arrest at a protest. The day after that, he wrote about a sheriff’s beating a black lawyer bloody. The day after that, he wrote about a judge reviewing a ban on Negro demonstrations.

Four years earlier, Sitton replaced Johnny Popham, who both acknowledged his discomfort covering race relations and refused to fly, meaning The Times had been covering the era’s biggest story at the pace of a Southern back road as Popham drove everywhere in boat-size sedans, from Houma to Chattanooga to Tuscaloosa, about 40,000 miles a year.

Given the chance to return to and write about the South, Sitton quickly emerged as a leader on the beat, the rare reporter unafraid to contradict an official source he knew to be lying. Civil rights workers carried his phone number in case they got into trouble. In 1964, Newsweek called him ‘‘the best daily newspaperman on the Southern scene.’’

But the accolades were a long way off that night in Sasser, Ga. When Sitton returned to his car after the voter-registration meeting, he found a puncture mark from a knife and a flat tire. The gasoline tank was filled with sand. He included both facts in his story. Afterward, a fellow reporter liked to tease him about his habit of sitting in restaurants with his eyes toward the door. ‘‘Just prudent,’’ Sitton would say. ‘‘Just prudent.’’

The photographer Mary Ellen Mark (b. 1940) often immersed herself for weeks or months in the lives of the disenfranchised — women on the security ward of the Oregon State Hospital, prostitutes working Falkland Road in Bombay, teenagers living on the streets of Seattle. She emerged with enduring images of humanity on the margins. ‘‘I’m interested in reality, and I’m interested in survival,’’ she once explained to an interviewer. ‘‘I’m interested in people who aren’t the lucky ones, who maybe have a tougher time surviving, and telling their story.’’

‘‘It separates you from everything and everybody,’’ Glenn Ford said about his 29 years on death row. ‘‘Can you imagine going 20-some years without no human contact?’’ Perhaps it is impossible to truly imagine years, let alone decades, on death row, particularly for someone like Ford, who was incarcerated for a crime he did not commit. In 1984, he was convicted of killing Isadore Rozeman, a jeweler in Shreveport, La., for whom Ford had done yard work. The court appointed two lawyers with no criminal-­law experience to defend him, and despite scant evidence, an all-white jury took less than three hours to find him guilty.

From then on, Ford lived in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, in a concrete cell the size of a bathroom. Three hours a week, he was allowed outside to exercise, but even there he was alone and in a cage offering less freedom than a dog run. For his last seven years in prison, Ford refused to even go outside. He called the exercise pen ‘‘ridiculous.’’ Being in a solitary cage outdoors was more like a taunt than a respite.

In other parts of the prison, inmates could touch visitors; they could hold hands and even embrace. But nearly all death-row visits are ‘‘no contact,’’ in which there is a plexiglass partition between the inmate and his visitor. Angola allowed Ford up to four contact visits a year with his family and friends, but even then the visits offered only a facsimile of intimacy: They were conducted under the watch of a prison guard. Ford decided not to see his family while he was on death row. He didn’t explain why, but perhaps, like being in a cage outside, such meager contact with family would only remind him of all he was missing.

Paradoxically, solitary meant never having privacy. Ford was alone in his cell, but he was never in control of when he was looked at or by whom. There were open bars on the cell doors, the lights never went completely dark and guards walked the tier to do prisoner checks. Cameras were present, letters were opened, phone calls were monitored and recorded. Every day had this steady hum of low-grade humiliation.

Ford was constantly cold in the winter months, and in the summer his cell was brutally hot. His health deteriorated. He had an untreated tendon injury in his knee, a severe stomach illness and a misdiagnosed gallbladder infection that resulted in emergency surgery. He lost most of his teeth. In 2011, a blood test indicated that Ford could have cancer, but he said he was repeatedly denied access to an oncologist. The underlying message was clear: On death row, the body wasn’t entitled to be well. It just needed to be maintained until execution.

What’s most difficult to imagine are the long days that made up the months and years. For Glenn Ford, that total was 10,680 days. There were few institutional gestures toward education or rehabilitation on death row. Some inmates developed compulsive habits, like counting the 358 rivets on the cell doors over and over. Ford’s salvation was that he loved making drawings and became very good at it. But Angola banned art supplies from death row for years at a time. Ford also filled his days by reading books, listening to music and writing letters. In the hour a day he was allowed outside his cell, he would talk to the other men on his tier and sometimes play chess through the bars. Occasionally, the sameness of the days would be broken by the execution of one of the men. Ford described low points in which he would withdraw into himself for months at a time, not writing or talking. He didn’t explain more, but you can imagine a retreat into a kind of psychological hibernation. Yet somehow, he would recover himself. He always believed that he would be freed, and perhaps that goal gave him the particular combination of focus and distraction he needed to endure.

Last year, the district attorney’s office announced that it had new evidence that Ford was ‘‘neither present at nor a participant in’’ the crime for which he was convicted. Ford was released with nothing but an apology from the warden and a debit card with a balance of $20.24. Riding in a car leaving the prison, his lawyers stopped to get him a meal. But Ford just sat in the car and didn’t move. He was at a loss because he hadn’t opened or closed a door in three decades. ‘‘One night you are sleeping on death row, and the next morning you are in the free world,’’ he said. ‘‘That’s how overwhelmed I still am.’’

Forty days after Ford was freed, he found out he had terminal lung cancer. Jumping from the slow years he had served to the quick months he had left to live, he went from one radically distorted relationship with time to another.

The state found a way to refuse compensation for his wrongful incarceration. He was free, but destitute and dying. He lived in a facility run by the charity Resurrection After Exoneration, where his needs were covered by donations and volunteers.

In March, A.M. Stroud, the lead prosecutor in Ford’s case, wrote a passionate apology in The Shreveport Times, admitting that the trial wasn’t fair and that evidence was withheld from the defense. Stroud berated his past self for being more concerned with winning than with discovering the truth. A month later, ‘‘Nightline’’ arranged for Ford and Stroud to meet so Stroud could apologize in person. In the television footage, Stroud walks into Ford’s room and stands as he speaks to him; he practically glows with the relief of his contrition. ‘‘I wasn’t a very good person at all,’’ Stroud says. ‘‘So I apologize for that.’’ Ford is a frail, tiny figure in a sweater seated in the corner of the frame. He barely looks up as Stroud finishes, and then Ford responds, his words labored and breathy and slow. ‘‘It happened, it happened,’’ he said. ‘‘And I’m sorry I can’t forgive you. I really am.’’

The last thing Patti Smith bought from Something Special, a store in SoHo owned by Lenny Cecere, was a simple brown rosary — similar to the one Lenny kept beside him at the cluttered counter where he sat for nearly 40 years. The store was on the southwest corner of Macdougal and Houston, on the ground floor of the building that Lenny (everyone called him Lenny) bought and raised his family in. Aside from candy, soda and hot chocolate, the inventory didn’t budge: The costume jewelry, vinyl purses for subway tokens, porcelain figurines and yellowed greeting cards were covered in dust. Mailbox rentals became the main draw after he retrieved a bank of them from a building superintendent, but Lenny rented them cheaply — and selectively. He had retired after 23 years with Kodak, and profit wasn’t his primary calculus. ‘‘Most stores keep open to stay alive,’’ said Pino Cinquemani, the rare butcher remaining in SoHo. ‘‘He just wanted to be there.’’

Other people wanted to be there, too: people who grew up in SoHo, local politicians, writers, actors and artists. Matthew Broderick — P.O. Box No.36 — was one of Lenny’s first boxholders in 1988, when he lived on Charlton Street; Sarah Jessica Parker started getting her mail there in 1993, when she moved in with Broderick. She liked to help Lenny behind the counter during the after-school rush, when the kids poured in from a school a few doors down.

‘‘Any trace of neighborhood was disappearing,’’ Parker said, ‘‘but the position taken by Lenny was that nothing was going to change.’’ And so he stood behind that counter — cranky, or knowing, or on the phone arguing with the gas company. He took his time with friendliness, which was why it was valuable. In an age of tip jars and fake cheer, Lenny was himself. He took a decade to warm to me; Broderick told me that Lenny shared a prosciutto-­and-­fig sandwich with him after seven years. ‘‘I think he needed to know I wasn’t a fly-by-night, flash-in-the-pan type of person,’’ Broderick said. ‘‘To get any kind of approval from him was a good feeling. I felt like a part of old New York if I was accepted there. And I’m from New York.’’

Stopping by Lenny’s was as ‘‘essential as morning coffee,’’ Smith said. ‘‘But the best thing was simply that he was always there.’’ In his last days, she was allowed to sit with Lenny in his apartment upstairs. And she sang ‘‘Stardust.’’ He liked that song.

In a honky-tonk heartbreak song, the pedal-steel guitar typically enters first, before the vocals. It opens by playing the tag end of the chorus, establishing the genre’s achingly fused emotional state — ‘‘Forget her; let’s party’’ perpetually giving way to ‘‘It’s no use; I miss her’’ — with a wash of sustained notes, some bent as they ring out, so that chord voicings melt into one another even without a new note being struck. This fluid quality of the sound of the pedal steel, the strings of which the player picks with one hand and frets with a sliding steel tone bar held in the other while using foot pedals and knee levers to change the pitch of different combinations of strings, makes it a perfect instrument for expressing complex feeling. Jauntiness flows into despair like C major into A minor when you press the first pedal in E9 tuning.

When the singer enters, the pedal steel assumes a supporting role, framing and responding to the storytelling voice. More than any other instrument in the band, it’s the pedal steel that maps the world of the song and puts you there, with your drink in front of you and your change growing damp on the bar. And it’s the pedal steel, bending and sliding one note or chord into another, that immerses you in yearning and regret not as two distinct feelings but as simultaneous elements of the distinctive honky-tonk mood.

The pedal steel is to country music what the electric guitar is to urban blues, a similarly ideal match for the human voice and an instantly recognizable cue for emo­tional states so familiar that they seem ancient and universal. But unlike blues guitar, the sound of the pedal steel is in great part the creation of a single, prodigiously influential musical and mechanical innovator.

‘‘Buddy Emmons is who you get if you cross Charlie Parker and Les Paul,’’ says Paul Franklin, an eminent pedal-steel guitarist who plays on the Nashville star Kacey Musgraves’s recent recording of ‘‘Are You Sure,’’ a song written by Emmons and Willie Nelson. ‘‘Buddy invented the modern pedal steel.’’ When Emmons began his career in the 1950s, steel players had already begun using pedals to change pitches, but they had not gone far in exploring the musical possibilities the pedals opened up. ‘‘The instrument was in its infancy,’’ Franklin says, ‘‘and Buddy was this big musical mind who felt trapped by its limitations.’’

The pedal steel couldn’t yet make the music Emmons heard in his head, so he changed the instrument, coming up with the three-pedal array that became the industry standard, still known as ‘‘the Emmons setup.’’ Sho-Bud and Emmons brand pedal steels designed by him became the state of the art in the 1960s. Nashville pedal-steel players generally acknowledge him as the foremost steel guitarist of his time, with unmatched touch, tone, phrasing and harmonic ideas, but anybody who plays a pedal steel in any style today, even gospel or jazz or juju, registers his influence as an inventor who led the way in perfecting the instrument.

Emmons, a self-taught musician, also led the way as a player, developing the pedal steel’s musical range while touring in the bands of George Jones, Ernest Tubb, Ray Price and Roger Miller, and during a five-decade career as a first-call session player in Nashville and Los Angeles. He also recorded jazz albums that merged bebop and chicken-picking sensibilities with effortless sophistication.

His virtuosity inevitably overspilled the constraints of any one style or role, but Emmons — like his instrument — might have been at his very best when paired with a great country singer. The first sound you hear on Price’s classic 1963 album, ‘‘Night Life’’ (which includes ‘‘Are You Sure’’), is Emmons’s pedal steel pensively tracing a five-chord progression that tinges the honky-tonk palette with jazzy colors, establishing the album’s louche, bittersweet mood with exquisite precision before ceding center stage to Price’s voice. You can hear concentrated in that brief introductory passage, and in the fills and background figures and restrained solos he plays throughout the album, the inspiration that Emmons poured into his instrument as he taught it new ways to express feeling.

Elisabeth Elliot B. 1926

Leaps of Faith

After her missionary husband died, she went to live with his killers.

Photo

Elisabeth Elliot, second from right, circa 1959.
Credit
Photograph from the Elliot family

By Susan Dominus

They shared a deep Christian faith but were otherwise an unlikely pair. The daughter of Philadelphia evangelicals, Elisabeth Howard was an intense scholar, a bit gawky and slow to smile. Jim Elliot was more playful, a gifted speaker, a wrestler at Wheaton College in Illinois, where they were both students.

She adored him and waited for five years for Elliot to resolve the question of whether God intended for him to do his life’s work with a wife at his side. The answer was yes. They reunited and married in Ecuador, where they were both working as missionaries, in 1953.

It was Jim’s dream to preach in Ecuador’s Amazonian jungles, to a tribe so violent toward outsiders that nearby people called them the Aucas — the savages. To Jim and four other missionaries who longed to convert those tribe members — they called themselves the Waorani — the danger only heightened their sense of purpose. Looking back, Elisabeth remarked on her husband’s ‘‘nearly reckless exuberance’’ about the cause.

In early 1956, after months of friendly overtures — dropping gifts from a plane, shouting greetings — the five missionaries set up camp on a river near the tribe’s settlement, a strip they named Palm Beach. Soon after, the men radioed back to the missionary camp word of peaceful contact with the tribe. Two days later, there was silence. A search mission went out. All five men were eventually confirmed dead, their bodies pierced by spears.

By then, Elliot was the mother of a 10-month-old girl, Valerie. She had pined for her husband for five years; they were married for only two.

Elliot quickly channeled all of the emotion of the expedition into ‘‘Through Gates of Splendor,’’ a vivid account of the five missionaries’ lives and deaths. Explicitly spiritual, the book was ideal recruitment material, an adventure tale rich with detail about the locals’ ways, the young men’s brio, the beauty of the natural surroundings. Considered one of the most influential Christian books of the 20th century, it made Jim Elliot a posthumous hero, inspiring hundreds if not thousands of young missionaries to follow his example.

Elisabeth did not retreat to the safety of a writer’s life in the States; she remained in the field. One day in November 1957, she learned that two Waorani women had appeared in a region not far from where she was living in Ecuador. She quickly tried to befriend them. When the two women returned home almost a year later, she went along, bringing her daughter with her.

Many in the missionary movement considered it madness for Elliot to pursue evangelizing to the Waorani, but she was determined. In 1958, she added an epilogue to ‘‘Through Gates of Splendor,’’ updating readers on where life had taken her. ‘‘Today I sit in a tiny leaf-thatched hut on the Tiwanu River, not many miles southwest of ‘Palm Beach,’ ’’ she wrote. ‘‘In another leaf house, just about 10 feet away, sit two of the seven men who killed my husband. Gikita, one of the men, has just helped Valerie, who is now 3 and one-half, roast a plantain.’’

‘‘Through Gates of Splendor’’ was a book about spiritual dreams. Elliot’s subsequent book, ‘‘The Savage My Kinsman,’’ about her two years living among the Waorani, addressed the earthly reality. She had thought she would be bringing the tribe progress, preaching faith, dispensing medicines; instead, she realized, for them she was an extra mouth to feed, an incompetent buffoon with a never-ending stream of inane questions. Sermons were hardly reverent affairs. The Waorani made ‘‘rude noises,’’ she wrote, and picked at their foot fungus. She had no confidence, in any case, that they were understanding references to the Son of God — maybe in translation that meant ‘‘offspring of the fish.’’ She came to see in her work high comedy; but she also recognized that her efforts, and those of other missionaries who followed, brought tragedy. ‘‘The Aucas heard the Gospel,’’ she wrote in 1981. ‘‘They also got polio.’’

Some Christian historians argue that missionary work ultimately helped the Waorani break a cycle of violent vendettas. But Elliot seemed more compelled to write about her ambivalence than to celebrate victories. In 1966, she wrote a novel, ‘‘No Graven Image,’’ about a missionary in Ecuador tormented by doubt about the purpose of her work. The missionary dispenses penicillin to her one almost-successful convert, only to watch him die of anaphylactic shock, despite her pleas to the Lord. That is not a religious nadir from which the narrator emerges to find spiritual clarity; it is simply the end of the book.

To Elliot, doubts about aspects of the missionary work itself did not reflect a loss of faith, but some of her supporters nonetheless turned against her. Many Christian libraries refused to carry the book. Eventually, she remarried and reinvented herself as a writer on Christian femininity. With ‘‘Passion and Purity’’ in 1984, she chronicled her ardent, occasionally conflicted and chaste-until-marriage love affair with Jim. She became the kind of speaker who could preach abstinence to an audience of 17,000 college students and bring them to their feet.

Elisabeth Elliot’s faith made her bold — bold enough to build a rapport with people who, as she wrote, originally ‘‘spelled ‘death’ to me.’’ It is hard to reconcile that independent woman with the one who wrote, later in life, that a woman’s place was to ‘‘follow, adapt, submit’’ to the rule of man. Although she lived side by side with the Waorani, Jim may be even better known, thanks to her books, as one of the most inspiring missionaries of the 20th century. In the end, and by her own design, she is remembered as a Christian woman who loved her husband.

At 8:40 a.m., before she turned her computer on, before the work day had even begun, a 28-year-old Bank of America legal assistant stood next to the copy machine. She heard a whoosh and a clap of thunder and felt her building sway. Through a window she saw papers flitting past, computers raining down, then heavy shadows falling fast. Dressed in pearls and a fitted blouse and a pencil skirt, Marcy Borders was told by her supervisor that it was just an accident and to stay at her desk, but she felt she had to do otherwise. She rushed to join a crowd of office workers in the staircase. She raced down 81 flights, carried by a wave of workers, sometimes skipping multiple steps. Minutes after she emerged from the North Tower, the South Tower collapsed, spreading billowing plumes of debris around the office buildings downtown. She was knocked down on all fours. Her clothes were still tucked in, covered by a gray soot. Choked by dust, she couldn’t breathe. She cried out that she didn’t want to die. She said it to herself over and over.

She was in shock. A shirtless stranger pulled her into the lobby of a nearby building. There, she was photographed by Stan Honda from the Agence France-Presse. She froze, mouth agape, her hands reaching out as her eyes locked onto Honda’s lens. The photo of Marcy Borders differs from many other records of 9/11. She’s not running, she’s not falling, she’s not dead, but she’s not really alive either. She’s captive, haunted, already history, a modern Pompeian cast in ash, terrorized inside and out, her eyes pleading for an explanation.

That day never faded. She could still taste the soot, still hear screams that turned into silence. She told a reporter she felt as if she had front-row seats for the end of the world. The photo dubbed the Dust Lady appeared in newspapers around the world, including Arabic ones. And that fame increased her paranoia. She believed Osama bin Laden was not done. He would not stop with the World Trade Center; he would pursue her. She saw his bearded face in news reports and imagined his arms reaching out to grab her. For a month after 9/11, Borders’s sister Dawn sat with her in their native Bayonne, N.J., on a peninsula south of Jersey City fortified by shipyards from which Lower Manhattan is visible, looming off in the distance.

Borders wouldn’t go back to work. She wouldn’t go into Manhattan, ride subways or buses or boats. She stopped talking to people and didn’t leave her apartment. She feared for her life, that a missile might hit her. She began to drink, sometimes to the point of blacking out. Her 8-year-old daughter, Noelle, spent more time with her paternal grandmother. Borders went to a parade in her hometown with Noelle, but when a plane rumbled overhead, she looked for cover and ran. For Noelle’s eighth-grade graduation, the family took a limo into Manhattan, but Borders wouldn’t get out. Anytime she saw a person perched on a roof, she thought it was bin Laden or a sniper taking aim. She developed a crack habit, and for the decade following 9/11, she was only intermittently sober. She gave birth to a son, Zay’den, when she was 35 but soon lost custody of him. She described herself as a garbage can — addicted to crack, cocaine, marijuana and alcohol. Her weight dropped to 90 pounds. She was suicidal.

Before the terrorist attack, Borders was outgoing and rambunctious. As a child, she would go to school in neat pigtails and come home with her hair knotted from hours of playing basketball. Glimpses of that Borders still emerged every now and then at family gatherings. In a video from 2006, at a Sweet 16 party for her cousin Shaniqua, Borders was effusive, loving, joyful, reluctant to relinquish the spotlight. She pulled Shaniqua in and said, ‘‘I wish you many more.’’ Then, still chattering away, she shimmied her shoulders and dipped her knees, eating up the attention.

In April 2011, Borders checked herself into a rehab center. Eight days later, Osama bin Laden was killed. His death was a salve. She left rehab after a month of treatment and attended Narcotics Anonymous twice a day. She went back to Sunday sermons at the Angelic Baptist Church, where she was a member of the Praise Dance squad, swaying and clapping along to gospel hymns like ‘‘A Little More Jesus.’’ Her favorite was ‘‘What the Lord Has Done in Me,’’ and when she sang it, she threw herself into every syllable.

Borders did not like to look at the photo of the Dust Lady — she didn’t want to be reminded of that day or feel like a victim. She was working again, volunteering for a local mayoral candidate. But in 2014, Borders complained of stomach pains. She didn’t have health insurance and took a while to see a doctor. That August, she received a diagnosis of stomach cancer. Borders wondered about the connection with ground zero: More than 4,100 people who were there have come down with cancer. After one round of chemotherapy — but before surgery — her medical bills exceeded $190,000. She traded on her unwanted celebrity and asked for jobs. She asked for help with her overdue expenses and for money to pay for future treatments. The mayor of Bayonne offered to help with health insurance, but the offer came too late. She died a few months later, at 42. Borders got out of the building, but she never escaped the terror or the dust.

Candida Royalle (b.1950) went from performing in X-rated movies to directing and producing erotic films for women, and in the process championed her own brand of feminism. ‘‘I think if we want to live in a world where free expression is allowed,’’ she wrote, ‘‘we have to accept that there’s going to be imagery we don’t like or agree with. The best way to counter it is to get out there and create what you’d like to see yourself. Then let the public choose for themselves.’’

Lee Israel B. 1939

Literary Theft

First she stole their words. Then she made them up.

Photo

Lee Israel in 2008.
Credit
Andrew Henderson/The New York Times

By Michael Paterniti

Here’s a dirty secret: Writers are an unruly tribe of thieves, frauds and ventriloquists, desperately lifting what they can from real life, other writers, liquor stores — it doesn’t matter — and putting it to sometimes dubious use in the name of art and authenticity. If that sounds outrageous, or ungenerous, remember T.S. Eliot’s boiled-down dictum: Good writers borrow, great writers steal. Or that the best-selling novel of all-time, Dickens’s ‘‘A Tale of Two Cities,’’ was most likely ripped off from, among other sources, ‘‘The Dead Heart,’’ a play by a writer we most certainly don’t remember, Watts Phillips.

This literary shoplifting — the appropriation/borrowing/outright larceny of material and lyric — happens in various manners, among all phyla of writer, in all genres. At its most ham-fisted, it’s outright plagiarism, while in the hands of the masters, the contraband becomes inflected, ingrained, inconspicuous. (It’s like Nirvana endeavoring to write a Pixies song and coming up with ‘‘Smells like Teen Spirit.’’) But in the case of Lee Israel — a successful celebrity magazine writer and biographer whose best years roughly spanned the two decades from 1970 to 1990 — the kleptomania went a click further, from ventriloquy to forgery, from aspiration to identity theft.

At the height of her career, Lee Israel was, as her lawyer Lloyd Epstein phrases it, ‘‘People magazine before People magazine.’’ As one of the premier celebrity journalists of her day, she profiled Katharine Hepburn for Esquire, as well as Paul Simon and Peter Fonda for The New York Times. She wrote biographies, including a best seller about Dorothy Kilgallen, a regular panelist on the game show ‘‘What’s My Line’’; other subjects included Estée Lauder and Tallulah Bankhead, the insouciant, polysexual theater and film star who once uttered, ‘‘I’m as pure as the driven slush.’’ Israel seemed to idolize strong, witty, acerbic women. But as she chronicled the glamorous and beautiful — those who went swanning from party to party and partner to partner in Hollywood, or clustered at the Algonquin Hotel to drink and gossip — she lived alone, writing with a cat on her lap in her Upper West Side apartment. She was a solitary method writer, living dozens of glittering lives in her mind while possessing a fairly dull one out of it.

And then, as these stories often go, things took their turn. The work dried up; the martini lunches evaporated; bouts of depression and full-blown alcoholism hindered both her professional and personal relationships. She went from ‘‘best-seller-dom to welfare,’’ as she wrote, working temp jobs she could barely hold. (In one case, after being fired by a very rich woman, she was shown to the door by ‘‘one of the Chinese domestics … doubtless to make sure that I did not pocket one of the pre-Columbian arrowheads — which I would have done in a Mayan minute.’’) She entered a messy phase of midlife squalor that she herself noticed only when flies appeared everywhere in the apartment, attracted by the cat excrement collecting under the bed. Drunk, she made crank calls as Nora Ephron or as Barbra Streisand’s secretary, just to see if she could get powerful editors and agents, the ones who would never accept a Lee Israel call now, on the line. (Eventually, Ephron’s lawyers asked her to cease and desist, which she did.)

Her greatest solace came at the library. Bereft of opportunity, energy and ideas, she read the letters of the writers she revered in hopes of finding some candle of inspiration. And inspiration indeed followed, but warped by need. First, in 1990, she stole three letters written by Fanny Brice, an actress and singer from the ’20s. She sold them for $40 a piece, to a dealer who told her exactly what gave such letters their value. (Personal details were gold; postscripts always pushed the price into bonus territory.)

Later, Israel would say that the idea to turn her theft into a creative act — to forge instead of steal — first occurred to her while reading the letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Yes, they were good, but really, Israel thought, they could be better. Just a little. In these casual, chatty word bursts, even the greatest writers seemed human, revealing the mundanities and cattiness of everyday life. Being broke, Israel also realized that such letters could cast a more money-worthy spell if she wrote them herself. People of a certain ilk — like the rich woman with the pre-Columbian arrowheads — loved such letters. It didn’t matter so much what they said, or if they were even real in the end, just so long as the illusion prevailed that they’d been touched by some famous hand.

When she found a cache of correspondence by Louise Brooks — the American actress and dancer who became the living incarnation of a flapper — she began by copying them at the library, then finding the appropriate stationery and typewriter to recopy them. Then she added new paragraphs and postscripts. (‘‘That terrible old fart, the Tyranny Addict Joe Kennedy, ruined Gloria Swanson,’’ read one.) Soon there were more copied letters by more famous people, and eventually fully imagined epistles constructed from her research. Over two years, the final sum of her subterfuge was about 400 ‘‘bogus billets,’’ as she had it, totaling nearly 100,000 words. She blurred into Dorothy Parker (‘‘I have a hangover out of Gounod’s Faust’’), witticized as Noël Coward about Marlene Dietrich (‘‘Marlene seems to think that she is the only higher primate to suffer the depredations of growing old’’), expounded as Edna Ferber (‘‘Poor, lovely, touching Jimmy Dean! His self-slaughter [and that’s exactly what it was] appalls me.’’). In others, she became Eugene O’Neill, Aldous Huxley, Lillian Hellman, Humphrey Bogart and Kurt Weill. She told dealers that a cousin had been a collector, but some of them were concerned less with pedigree than with profit. The letters were a hit!

Eventually she kept a hidden locker full of typewriters — Royals, Adlers, Remingtons, Olympias — tagging each model with the name of its putative owner. She forged signatures by holding her newly written masterpieces up against the copied letters on her ‘‘light box,’’ an old TV that broadcast static but produced enough glow to allow her to trace the handwriting. ‘‘My success as a forger,’’ Israel wrote, ‘‘was somehow in sync with my erstwhile success as a biographer: I had for decades practiced a kind of merged identity with my subjects.’’ Two of her missives made it into ‘‘The Letters of Noël Coward’’; another was so good it was valued at $2,500.

On July 27, 1992, Israel was approached by two F.B.I. agents after she finished a pastrami sandwich at a Midtown deli. They confronted her with what they knew (West Coast dealers had long come to suspect her forgeries, in part because her dear Noël Coward discussed his homosexuality, something in life he’d been loath to do). She parried with her Miranda rights, so they didn’t arrest her immediately. At home, she guzzled Scotch from the bottle, shredded research and stationery, rushed to her typewriter locker, where she removed the offending machines and, racing to and fro, deposited them, trash can by trash can, over a mile stretch of Amsterdam Avenue. That evening the agents returned, this time with a subpoena.

‘‘In the end, our defense was that there’d been a conspiracy of the willing,’’ Epstein says. ‘‘The dealers were in on it and made a lot of money from it, dealers who would have known. And there were buyers, people who had status — effete, precious snobs — who wanted to show off. No harm, no foul. On the other hand, I think she felt very guilty about the letters she actually took. She understood her own desperation, verging on mental illness at the time, and it was something she was not proud of.’’ Israel was sentenced to six months of house arrest, and five more months on probation, banned for life from the libraries she so loved. What pained her as well, she said, was that she’d joined ‘‘the great global souk, the marketplace of bad company and bad faith.’’

And yet — and here’s the oddest thing — her shame was accompanied by a kind of exhilaration. Pure, unbridled exhilaration. Joy, even. In the act of inhabiting her heroes, Israel had finally actualized herself as a writer. ‘‘I was a better writer as a forger,’’ she admitted. Her greatness came in the stealing, as T.S. Eliot would have it, and in the stealing she created a life full of intrigue and a legacy where there’d been none.

Soon the phone rang again. The agents and publishers who’d snubbed her were now asking her to lunch. Would she write a memoir about her felonious run?

Titled ‘‘Can You Ever Forgive Me?’’ the book — by turns witty and conspiratorial and full of her forgeries, replete with their forged signatures — is signed at the end, in cursive, Lee Israel’s own name by her own hand. The L loops gracefully. The I reaches higher than the other letters. It’s a beautiful signature, really. The nicest of the lot.

Lars Tunbjork B. 1956

Everyday Strange

A shy photographer delighted by the odd.

Photo

“Church House, Kyloe, England,” by Lars Tunbjork.
Credit
Lars Tunbjork for The New York Times

By Charles McGrath

The Swedish photographer Lars Tunbjork was a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine, where his work was particularly valued for the way it captures the strangeness of everyday life, as in this picture of an English couple lounging in the backyard of the remodeled church they call home. The image appeared in the magazine in 2010 as part of a feature called ‘‘Really Extreme Makeover.’’

Tunbjork was also a big deal in the world of art photography: His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Pompidou Center. But on meeting him, you’d never have guessed that. He was shy, modest, with a quietly goofy sense of humor, and part of his success came from the way he could melt into the background and make people forget he was taking their picture.

In 2005, we spent a week together in China for a story about the fancy new golf courses popping up there. The country, with all its incongruities, delighted him, and he was so open to new experience that he turned each day into a kind of adventure. That extended to what he ate. One night, I remember, he happily slurped some kind of horrible-looking intestines from a communal hot pot. Another evening he enjoyed a dish that, as far as I could make out, consisted of a chicken’s legs and comb but nothing from in between. When I declined to try it, he told me I didn’t know what I was missing.

A picture on Page 26 this weekend in the special Lives They Lived issue, with a profile of Amelia Boynton Robinson, was published in error. It shows Gloria Richardson, not Ms. Boynton Robinson.

Correction: Dec. 24, 2015

An earlier version of a picture with the introduction to this article was posted in error. It showed a mother and two children, not Kathryn Barnard.

Correction: Jan. 10, 2016

An article on Dec. 27 about Marcy Borders, in the The Lives They Lived issue, referred imprecisely to how Stan Honda took a photograph of Borders minutes after she fled one of the towers on Sept. 11. The photographer did not stop her.